Technology and Interruptions in the Workplace
by Gloria Mark and Victor Gonzalez

More than ever, managers and professionals are facing highly demanding workloads. Often times multiple activities are an inherent part of the job, while other times companies are struggling to do the same work with less people and are therefore increasing the number of tasks and responsibilities. There are often multiple projects, teams and initiatives. To add to the complexity, workers use a variety of digital and physical devices, such as e-mail, instant messaging, PDAs, cell phones and paper documents to conduct their work.

CRITO Faculty Associates Gloria Mark and Victor Gonzalez in their study “Constant, Constant, Multi-tasking Craziness” examined how people manage their work on multiple projects each with different goals, deadlines and resource constraints. Mark and Gonzalez argue that while the ever growing presence of IT in the work place might appear at face value to make tasks easier, paradoxically, it might be creating more chaos. Most current designs of information technology support distinct tasks such as writing and editing documents, using e-mail, or sending text or phone messages. But the current designs of information technology do not lend themselves to supporting cohesive task structures.

How people manage their activities at work and how their time is distributed is a significant topic. To better understand user requirements for supporting the management of multiple projects, the research team conducted detailed observational studies in two different high-tech companies over a period of three and a half working days. A total of thirty-six information workers were observed. They included managers, project leaders, financial analysts, software developers, sales executives and support engineers. Based on these observations, the researchers found:

• All the managers and professionals experienced a high level of fragmentation in the execution of their activities. They averaged about three minutes on a task and about two minutes on any electronic device or paper document before switching tasks.
• Informal interaction with co-workers was identified as the main source of interruptions.
• High fragmentation was experienced at both the project level and the task level.

In further analyzing their observations, Mark and Gonzalez introduced the concept of working spheres to explain the inherent way in which individuals conceptualize and organize their work. A working sphere can refer to short-term tasks, such as fixing a software component, or routine work such as daily maintenance of equipment, or long-term projects such as implementing a new infrastructure for a client. The researchers found:

• People worked in an average of 12 different working spheres.
• Working spheres were also highly fragmented. People spent about 10.5 minutes in a working sphere before they switched to another.
• 44% of working spheres are interrupted. About half the time people are interrupted by external sources, but half the time they interrupt themselves, such as checking e-mail.
• 82% of work was resumed on the same day. People worked on an average of nearly two intervening working spheres before resuming work on the original sphere. On average, it took about 23 minutes to resume interrupted work.

Although work fragmentation cannot be avoided, the negative effects of interruptions can be diminished if people have enough time to leave their activities in a state from where they can easily resume them. Many of the informants used post-it notes for those purposes, but often times the pressures of the workplace made it impossible to use even such simple mechanisms.
Face-to-face interruptions, rather than technology-mediated interruptions such as e-mail, are the most common cause of work fragmentation. Yet, sometimes those interruptions were beneficial for the persons being interrupted because they were related to the working spheres in which they were currently working.

While at first glance information technologies may appear to enhance work, a closer look reveals that in some ways they may not be contributing to worker productivity. The increased use of both digital and physical devices was found to create even more interruptions. In fact, the researchers were surprised with the extent of work fragmentation. There is a cost not only in the interruption but in reorienting back to work. Designers of information technology need to consider that workers switch constantly among work spheres. Current information technology is designed to support individual events, but would be more efficient if they provided a means or mechanism to integrate the multiple information objects required.