January 2006 – Distractions at work
Working at my desk last week
I was interrupted by a telephone call. It was
a researcher for BBC Radio Wales who wanted me
to talk on her morning show. “What’s
the subject?” I asked. “Distractions
at work,” she said.
That’s the thing about
distractions. We all love to hate them but rarely
do we like to acknowledge that our own work behaviours
are part of the problem. The programme was quoting
a research paper by Gloria Mark, an associate
professor at the school of information and computer
sciences, University of California, and research
student Victor Gonzalez, that studied the work
patterns of 36 information technology workers,
timing their activities to the second over three
days.
On average people were spending
about three minutes on a particular task before
they were either broken off or they interrupted
their own work to do something else. Work on specific
projects lasted a little longer, just over 10
minutes before people dropped what they were doing
and switched projects or took time for a break.
One employee complained of “constant, multi-tasking
craziness.”
Most of us must be familiar with
what seem to be increasing sources of work disruption.
Emails, telephone calls and text messages compete
for our attention with colleagues, managers, customers
and suppliers. A computer screen may be displaying
instant messaging, news feeds, share quotations
and various other attention grabbers. What once
could be viewed as distracting must now be viewed
as part of the job because so many jobs, by their
very nature, do not allow long periods of concentration.
An underlying concern, nevertheless,
must be that multiple distractions are becoming
so disrupting that they are delaying the completion
of important work, allowing trivial issues to
divert attention from the things that need to
get done.
Another recent report, The Cost
of Not Paying Attention, How Interruptions Impact
Knowledge Workers, by Jonathan Spira and Joshua
Feintuch, analysts at Basex, a business research
company, claimed that unnecessary interruptions
in the workplace were costing US businesses some
$588 bn a year.**
This somewhat staggering figure
is based on information workers earning on average
about $21 an hour. Observations undertaken by
Basex found that people who were doing most of
their work sitting at terminals, reading documents
and handling large amounts of information, were
wasting just over two hours a day attending to
disruptions that were not relevant to their work.
In my case that is probably an
underestimate. I prefer to work away from the
distractions of the office. Instead I have the
distractions of the home - the dog barking at
delivery vans, noisy children during school breaks,
and the heron that likes to raid my pond. In contrast
with the office these are quite pleasant distractions,
even the heron that does its best to avoid distracting
anyone.
Sitting at a terminal eight
hours a day, answering every phone call, reading
every email would drive me to distraction. Maybe
that is the real problem. As the Californian study
noted, some interruptions we impose on ourselves,
possibly as a way of coping with competing information
streams that would otherwise overload our brains.
Just as a computer slows down when several pieces
of software are open at once, our brains are surely
doing the same.
So how should employees deal
with distractions? One way is to develop routines
and patterns. One of my former colleagues would
stand up and walk around the office, thinking
things through, in preparation for a feature that
would be done in short order, once he returned
to the desk. Another colleague would get her gossiping
out of the way in concentrated intervals before
carving out a period of the day in which she steadfastly
ignored most distractions. A deadline is always
helpful.
When, in those rare sessions,
there is the opportunity to immerse yourself in
a concentrated piece of work, it is surprising
and satisfying just how much work can be achieved.
The changing nature of information
technology, often creating demands for working
on many separate projects, raises the question
of whether full-time working is a good idea when
contract work is so suited to uneven work-flows.
A new study has found that temporary
workers tend to feel happier with their work than
their permanent counterparts. The study by David
Guest and Michael Clinton at the Department of
Management, Kings College, London, surveyed attitudes
to work among 642 UK workers among 19 employers.***
A quarter of the employees had temporary contracts.
The researchers found that,
contrary to expectations, workers on temporary
contracts reported better health, a stronger sense
of well being, more positive attitudes to work
and better work behaviour than their full-time
colleagues. While temporary workers displayed
a higher level of job insecurity it did not effect
their attitudes to work. Overall temporary workers
were clearer about their job roles and suffered
less from work overload. They had a much stronger
perception of the obligations implied in their
contract and reported fairer treatment by their
employers.
The research speculates that
the root cause of these differences may lie in
the deterioration of permanent jobs. “Many
permanent workers report high levels of work overload,
relatively high levels of irritation, anxiety
and depression and a strong interference of work
with life at home. Temporary work may have drawbacks;
but for many people in permanent contracts, the
experience of work is markedly more negative.”
One reason for these differences,
I believe, is the increasing difficulty experienced
by many people dealing with various distractions,
company bureaucracy and increasing management
demands. The Basex report highlights a need for
what it calls “attention management”
suggesting that people could improve the way they
handle interruptions.
In the same way those who cause
the distractions might think a little bit about
how they approach their work. While a lot of interruptions
today are thoughtless, some are calculated to
catch people at quiet times. Headhunters will
often ring executives early before most company
meetings get underway.
In some cases, I suspect, distractions
are viewed as a temporary refuge from an unpleasant
task. The proliferation of the internet relies
on people’s willingness to wander on the
web. One business’s productivity loss from
a web-distracted worker, therefore, may be another’s
gain in marketing exposure or even a direct sale.
For all the apparent “losses” caused
by distraction, I wonder how many gains are created
in new opportunities?
Indeed had it not been for that
Radio Wales phone call, I might have never come
across these various studies. Not all distractions
are a waste of time and, like advertising, it
is difficult to filter out that which is wasted.
But the question of whether employers should be
laying out more than a quarter of full time salaries
in accommodating ever increasing levels of distraction
might be worth some thought.
*Details of the research
can be obtained from Prof Mark, [email protected]
**www.basex.com
*** Temporary Employment Contracts,
Workers’ Wellbeing and Behaviour: Evidence from the
UK, by David Guest and Michael Clinton, www.kcl.ac.uk/management/research/r_paper38.htm