KnowledgeForward

I’ve seen many articles (such as this one in the New York Times Blog) quoting a Basex study lately:

It says the $650 billion figure is an estimate of the “cost of unnecessary interruptions” in terms of lost productivity and innovation.

I’m all for getting people to stop and introspect for a moment about how connectedness, interruptions, and information overload are effecting their lives and, if they are in a position to effect others, the effect they have on others.  I’m all for getting enterprises to actually recognize the issue and do something about it, such as seeking and enabling technologies and capabilities that can make information workers more effective by pulling important messages forward and pushing less important ones back. 

But this problem space has an “eye-rolling” problem and numbers that large just make it worse.  $650 billion?  By comparison the total budget for Medicare in 2007 was $367 billion.  GE’s total revenues for 2006 were $163 billion.  In November of 2007 there were 146.7 million people employed in the US, so $650 billion would equate to $4,430 for every worker in the country.  The 2007 Economist Pocket World in Figures lists the GDP of the United States as $11.7 trillion, so we’re talking about a 5.6% bump in GDP if everyone would stop annoying everyone else with interruptions.  Not too shabby considering $650 billion is larger than the total GDP of Sweden and Austria combined.  In fact, all of Australia (13th biggest economy in the world) could go on holiday for a year and world GDP would still be higher if the rest of the workers would just buckle down.  Hmmm.

I doubt it.  Is this figure more about goofing off and blowing off steam than interruptions?  Attention management should not become a proxy for all consensual socialization and breaktime that workers want to take.  That is an entirely separate, even more intractable issue. I’m sure the world GDP would go way up if everyone fired on all cylinders all day every day.  World GDP would also go up if there was no corruption, no disease, and peace on Earth. 

There are things that enterprises can do to use enterprise attention management principles to improve the effectiveness of information workers, but first the potential champions in an organization must be convinced this is a real issue that can actually be addressed.  Exaggerating its effects gets attention in the media,  but can discourage those in the executive suite that may be able to help.  And once you get executives to buy into a strategy based upon dollar savings rather than quality and speed of decision making and employee retention, you’ll be expected to prove how much you’ve saved in hard dollars later.