Interruptions: Meh, but Distracted Driving: Deadly

October 1, 2009 at 3:57 pm | In Attention Management, Information Work, interruption science | 1 Comment

Great article in the New York Times about distracted drivers: “At 60 M.P.H., Office Work Is High Risk” (part of an ongoing series).  I’ve shown a bit of skepticism in past entries about the extent of the cost of interruptions for information workers and the intractability of the problem.  I’ve said many of the interruptions fall into models that are either a net positive for the organization with closed-loop analysis, required by social contract, or better classified as social interactions and distractions.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t think distractions are a major issue.  Just that the cost, causes, and solutions are different for interruptions and distractions so it’s best not to blend them together.  For example, the messaging inbox is the most classic information worker distraction, but it can be dealt with by turning off toasts (for wired workers) or mobile devices.

I have also assumed that the task one is being distracted from is important, but not life critical such as performing surgery, disarming a bomb, sneaking up on an insurgent safehouse … or driving.  Distracted drivers are, in my opinion, a serious issue.

I think this issue decomposes into several parts and the NYT article is the first I’ve seen that does a good job of addressing most of them:

Shaking and shaming users: The ‘ol shake&shame is a one-two punch.  Start with horrifying anecdotes, articles, stats, and videos on how bad your behavior is without you knowing it.  Then follow with shaming by describing how inconsiderate these drivers are, how dumb it is (if it’s an editorial), how you’re not that important that you need to respond immediately, and end with its effects on the people and family of those injured or killed.

Legal: Can you successfully outlaw texting while driving?  It’s symbolic and, like seat belt laws, something that adds a slight risk of penalty after the fact if something happens (like tracing text messages to a conductor seconds before a crash).  Hey, it’s worth a shot for those extreme cases when something tragic results.

Psychological: How distractable are people?  Can they really multi-task?  Is it an addiction, ADHD, etc?  It certainly seems to me the majority of SUVs veering into my lane, driving real slow and then making a quick move, or running red lights slowly are on a mobile device.  And the research confirms my suspicions that technology like handsfree interfaces don’t solve the problem.  And while I think multi-tasking can work for information workers with coarsely grained, long-running tasks, I think it’s deadly for drivers.  There’s a fun game to test this at the NYT site.

Expectations: To what extent do the expectations of employers, customers, family, and other message senders drive the apparent need to respond immediately?  To what extent does an expectation of productivity later require culling messages now?  This is the part I’ve spent the most time thinking about and the NYT article finally sheds some light on.  No employer admits to requiring these responses (duh), but the plumber example shows how competitive pressure provides informal expectations.  I was in a cab going home from the airport on Friday and the taxi computer had popped up that a van was needed in zone 776.  My driver, since we were in a van, spent the next 10 minutes trying to rapidly respond to accept the pickup.  One time we came close enough to rear-ending another car that I was bug-eyed for a few seconds.  It seems the computer was smart enough to not allow him to claim the pickup for some reason, whether it’s because we were moving or the GPS noticed we were too far for him to promise a pickup (which would explain why my taxis always take twice as long as promised to arrive for pickups).

Success at getting people to stop texting while driving will depend more on managing the expectations of message senders for quick responses than it will on shaking&shaming, laws, or better research.  This goal is difficult to impossible depending on each situation.  “Feeling important” may be solvable with shaking&shaming, but for the plumber or taxi driver whose livelihood depends on picking up a job before the next guy gets it will be nearly impossible to reach.

Still, there may be some hope if the Domino’s Pizza example applies.  Domino’s advertising set an expectation for 30 minute delivery, but some large settlements for accidents prompted them to water down the expectation (to “satisfaction guaranteed”). I haven’t seen statistics on whether the settlements have decreased, but the goal was certainly that eliminating the expectation would eliminate the reckless driving behavior it caused.  Over time the same may occur to some extent with distracted driving.  For example, if a plumbing company anywhere in the US has to pay a multi-million dollar settlement and it goes viral on the news, you could see plumbing companies change their process to round-robin assignments or select randomly from all responses within the next 2 hours.

Cold Turkey Help for Digital Distractions

September 17, 2009 at 1:46 pm | In Attention Management, Information Work, interruption science | Leave a Comment

Great article in the New York Times on “Taming Your Digital Distractions“.  While it does follow the “e-mail and social networking = useless distractions” narrative that I find passe, so do most other articles, presentations, books, and studies on information overload.  So I can’t blame Farhad Manjoo for that. 

Besides, what I like is that it gets away from the empty pondering of what we’re doing to our lives and simple time management tips and, instead, provides a slew of actual technologies to try out.  I hadn’t seen these.  Here are the ones in the article and I’ve added links to each. (Note: I haven’t tried them, so this isn’t an endorsement).

  • WriteRoom (full-screen, single-tasking, simple word processing)
  • Dark Room (full-screen, single-tasking, simple word processing)
  • RescueTime Solo (attention shielding and metrics)
  • LeechBlock (attention shielding for Firefox)

While some information overload evangelists would hope these cold turkey tools would demonstrate to someone how addicted they are, I actually would hope for the opposite: that after an hour or so of getting work done they realize they didn’t really miss those distractions and that their social networks didn’t come crashing down because some responses were delayed. 

Once people realize that poor decisions cause their information stress rather than bad evolutionary wiring in their brains or addiction, I think they are more likely to make useful changes to their work processes to improve their efficiency.

Study Finds Multitaskers Poor Performers Since Easily Distracted

August 31, 2009 at 7:24 am | In Attention Management, interruption science | 2 Comments

From the Stanford University News (8/24/09)

Nass and his colleagues, Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner, set out to learn what gives multitaskers their edge. What is their gift?

“We kept looking for what they’re better at, and we didn’t find it,” said Ophir, the study’s lead author and a researcher in Stanford’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab.

Nass used 3 tests that involved noticing changes in short term abstractions, such as whether two rectangles changed position, whether a letter had previously appeared in sequence, and attending to attributes of letters or numbers in a mixed set.  In all cases multitaskers did worse than non-multitaskers since they were easily distracted.

From the little I’ve read of this study (I could certainly have missed important details) I don’t think the study goals were aimed properly.  If one assumes for the moment that multitasking is an intentional activity meant to achieve a purpose, the natural question is: what is that purpose?  The study seems to look for side effects of multitasking behavior, but without a hypothesis about what the purpose is.  I believe the purpose may be better handling of multiple tasks that have each have intermittent stimuli.  In other words, tasks where there are many gaps when your attentiveness is not needed.  For example, building a piece of furniture requires long stretches where one must wait for glue or varnish to dry.  Likewise, staring at an email inbox for 8 solid hours would not reward the user since there are gaps of many minutes between messages.  Multitasking – checking email while waiting for a coat of polyurethane to dry – enables both tasks to be completed more effectively. I did a blog entry on “Mandatory Multitasking” back in 2006 on this multitasking pattern.

I think a more accurate test would be a long-term writing assignment (say, summarizing a set of three twenty page papers into a 10 page paper in 4 hours) while playing an investment game that rewards reaction to events (such as payoffs for noticing trends that decreases rapidly over time).  Add some random interruptions as well for an extra element.  Quality of the summary and final investment tally would provide a weighted score.  The participant would have to be good at interrupting themselves and resuming their long-running task (“scanning the horizon”) in order to excel at the financial part of the score. 

As designed, the Nass test tested attention shielding (a capability for pushing unimportant messages and content further from the observer’s focus). The test I propose above evaluates interruptability instead. The study’s abstract confirms this as it defines multitaskers by attention shielding rather than self-controlled task switching (“heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory.”)

That said, I’m not positive or convinced that multitasking is intentional and purposeful.  But I think the possibility must be considered.  In this case, considering its purpose can guide development of experiments that test its value against its intended purpose.  It also reframes the issue.  The issue may be that some multitaskers miscategorize some tasks as intermittent (such as driving or air traffic control) that they shouldn’t rather than all multitasking on all tasks being suboptimal.  Or maybe some multitaskers have difficulty breaking long-running tasks up into smaller tasks that provide interruptible boundaries.  But I don’t think that multitaskers are some sort of dysfunctional species. 

What to Do The Day After Information Overload Awareness Day

August 13, 2009 at 8:45 am | In Attention Management, Culture, Information Work, etiquette, interruption science | Leave a Comment

So, you’ve survived Information Overload Awareness Day.  Your eyes were opened to the stress, poor decision making, and cold hard cash being sacrificed on the altar of our always-on, always-connected, go-go-go culture.  Now what do you do?

Well, first I’d recommend coming down off the mountain a little bit and taking a view of the issue from the ground.  Consider that the proliferation of information and communication channels should not be seen entirely in the negative (the “overload” problem).  The implication is that if you don’t feel the problem, someone must not have shaken you hard enough with studies on stress, the difficulty of finding things, or put a big enough number on the cost. 

Some exaggeration (or, to be more accurate, exclusive focusing on the negative) may be useful to shake people awake and scare them straight.  But there’s a risk they will become hysterical or stare into space.  After all, once one can see the information apocalypse is neigh, one has to figure out what to do about it. Those who do little gain only a sense of futility; they can see what is happening but do nothing about it.  While those who do too much risk vast unintended consequences.  Social bonds and efficiency suffer when people behave selfishly to shield themselves from interruptions that are unnecessary (to them).  Short lived attempts to change etiquette result in long-term feelings of bullying and reduce the effectiveness of future attempts.  Once-a-week time-outs (of e-mail, meetings) just shift the burden to other days while avoiding a root cause of the inefficiency: messages maintaining their channel without being pulled forward or pushed back as needed.  

I believe that an organization-wide, systemic, balanced approach that aims to improve efficiency for all workers is preferable to defining the situation in negative terms which start a war in response that can have vast unintended consequences. You can do take a balanced view by starting to think about:

  • A model (enterprise attention management) to organize, elicit (as an intuition pump), and communicate potential improvements that can increase the efficiency of a large number of workers (a systemic fix) rather than just personal tips on how any one person interested can help themselves
  • Who are the couple of people in your organization that can have a positive impact on the attention management abilities of everyone in the company?  What can executives and owners of communication systems do that is more than what any one individual worker can do?  
  • “Closed loop” rather than selfish view of interruptions.  Consider each interruption as an interaction between the interrupter and those interrupted and determining, as a whole, if it was useful to the organization. So what is a real interruption in your business?  What is “interrupted” versus “distracted” and what is an “unnecessary” interruption (does the person doing the interruption ever think their interruption is unnecessary and if not, who gets to judge)?
  • How social contracts and organizational structure influence interruptions and information flows in ways that aren’t captured in overload calculations and may result in unintended consequences if disrupted
  • How technology can help.  Technology is not the answer, but it’s certainly a lot of the problem and, accordingly, can be a participant in an improvement approach.  With a model in place, attentional capabilities of tools can be enumerated and used to their fullest extent to address known problems
  • Teachable moments.  Much of the information overload is due to etiquette and culture, but browbeating people to change their ways has little effect.  It’s been said that you can’t force changes in culture, but yet there are certainly cases where culture has been drastically changed.  Part of the answer lies in exploiting teachable moments to make positive changes in counterproductive communication and information management behaviors
  • Pacing.  Try to get a realistic idea of how much improvement you can actually target.  Even if 28% of workers’ days are wasted, 0% isn’t the proper target.  Step back and think about what the real target should be to get a realistic picture of potential cost savings. By all means, use the Basex number as an example of one extreme way of estimating it, but follow up by talking about the importance of determining a realistic goal for improvement.  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. Don’t use a sum of personal observations (rather than closed-loop), depend on colloquial and self-determined definitions, or build overall angst into your number

So, it’s a good thing if IOAD created an awareness that wasn’t there.  But the real value comes now – the day after – when organizations struggle with how to approach something described as such an enormous problem with tendrils in sociology, psychology, physiology, technology, and business.  My recommendation is to leave the negative framing (“overload”, “problem”) and self-helpy, guru-talk aside.  Now is the time to recast the issue in terms of systemic efficiency that can be analyzed with a conceptual model and target improvements that are both reasonable and achievable.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.

Four Key Points About Enterprise Attention Management

June 22, 2009 at 4:09 pm | In Attention Management, Information Work, interruption science | 1 Comment

I’m just putting the finishing touches on a new document on Enterprise Attention Management.  This one will be a short primer on our view of the subject.  It’s been over two years since my main document on EAM was published and my thinking has evolved as I’ve hit questions from people at presentations and in private conversations.  It’s also been shaped by the press coverage of information overload and e-mail overload – often by encouraging me to put warning signs in front of some slippery slopes that they wander into: Counting all distractions as interruptions?  Lumping interruptions into information overload?  Using 100% focus and efficiency as the benchmark to compare “cost of overload” to?  Assuming only tips and tricks for individuals can chip away at it?  Yeesh!

After a brief description of what enterprise attention management is and its business context, I describe 4 points that are key for my position on EAM:

1. Not Everyone Feels Overloaded

As strongly as you and a few like-minded people may feel about the impacts of information overload, a lot more people just don’t notice or care.  But improving efficiency and reaction time: that’s something everyone can get behind.  Get away from having to shake everyone awake about the “problem” and its a lot easier for others to get on board with your efficiency argument.

2. Key People in an Organization Can Take Action to Improve Efficiency of Information Workers

You can try to organize your little information garden and give tips to your teammates to do the same and one small portion of your company will breathe a little easier.  But there are a few people who select the gardening tools and set expectations for everyone’s gardens – they have a different set of things they can do to help everyone in the organization.

3. Use EAM as a Lens to Understand Impacts of New Information-based Technologies

Enterprise attention management can be used as a lens to analyze how various technologies and programs will impact the attention of information workers.  One recent example of applying this architecture is the “EAM for e-mail” posting I did here.

4. Influence Process and Culture Selectively

An evangelical approach to “information overload” starts with declaring it “bad” and then figuring out how to force people not to overload each other.  A more practical approach does not see lots of information as good or bad, but rather focuses on efficiency and looks for key moments when processes and culture can be influenced.  These include teachable moments, such as new hire training or rolling out a new technology.  They do not include an e-mail blast or interoffice memo out of nowhere telling everyone how they should now behave.

Silence Would Be An Interruption Here

June 3, 2009 at 3:34 pm | In Attention Management, Audio, Information Work, interruption science | Leave a Comment

I’m writing this blog post from a nice Japanese tea house near my home office.  While it’s nice, the real reason I’m working here has to do with the truck-mounted jackhammer tearing up the alley right outside my window.  The noise was shaking things on my office bookshelves.  Even putting on headphones didn’t help as my feet kept picking up pounding vibrations. 

Alley work sm

There is a lot written about the impact of interruptions in the workplace and their cost on productivity.  I have written that much of what is lumped into “interruptions” is really a set of different problems and solutions better known as distractions and social interactions.  Still, today’s experience has emphasized that attention can be difficult to focus (and productivity lost) for other reasons as well.  The jackhammer and bulldozer don’t really count as interruptions.  Indeed, the noise was quite constant for hours.  It’s hard to lose focus when you never have it in the first place!  I simply had a noisy environment that made it difficult to concentrate.  No amount of focus on keeping out interruptions would have helped.  The only solution was my Ceylon tea and scone haven.

I remember a situation when I was a management consultant where I worked for a few months on one floor of an office building where it was so quiet people had to whisper on the phone.  I then had occasion to visit a consultant working in a department on another floor and was shocked at the cacophony he worked in.  Same basic roles, same cube layout, but it was all noisy from loud conversations, hustling and bustling, and difficult to concentrate.  It seemed to be just a cultural difference in terms of expectations and etiquette between the departments.  A new employee sinking into their cube for the first time would naturally assume a conversational volume in line with those around him. Maybe some people would prefer one or the other?  I was happy to retreat back to my quiet cube to work.  And put on my headphones.

WSJ Offers Information Overload 101 Again

May 22, 2009 at 8:16 am | In Attention Management, Information Work, interruption science | 1 Comment

The WSJ published another article on information overload, which they generally do when Basex releases a new number on information overload, unnecessary interruptions, or interruptions (it’s evolved over the years).  You can see the comment I entered in the comments tab on the article (click here and look for Craig Roth).  Now that I re-read it, my comment sounds more harsh than intended.  It’s not a bad thing that this issue gets more attention.  There’s something to be said for the Basex approach of shaking people awake and getting them to see the danger in their current path.  The $900 billion number is like the “you won’t live to see your kid’s graduation” pronouncement that physicians sometimes trot out if an unhealthy  patient is ignoring his more measured advice to lose weight and exercise. 

Still, I’d like to see some of these articles getting past the “information overload 101″ template: observation on how we’re overloaded, quote from overloaded person, “woe is me” pronouncement, attitudinal survey stat, latest Basex figure, quote from an organized executive, personal time and attention management tips.

Get people to think about:

  •  “Closed loop” rather than selfish view of interruptions (treating each interruption as an interaction between the interrupter and those interrupted and determining, as a whole, if it was useful to the organization)
  • Pacing (even if 28% of workers’ days are wasted, 0% isn’t the proper target; step back and think about what the real target should be to get a realistic picture of potential cost savings)
  • What they really mean by interrupted versus distracted and what people call “unnecessary” interruptions (does the person doing the interruption ever think their interruption is unnecessary and if not, who gets to judge?
  • How social contracts and organizational structure influence interruptions and information flows in ways that aren’t captured in overload calculations
  • By all means, use the Basex number as an example of one extreme way of estimating it, but follow up by talking about the importance of determining a realistic goal for improvement.  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. The Basex number – from what I can tell – doesn’t serve that purpose since it’s a sum of personal observations rather than closed-loop, depends on colloquial and self-determined definitions, and is more an indication of overall angst than a number to actually target as waste.
  • How technology can help.  Technology is not the answer, but it’s certainly a lot of the problem and, accordingly, can be a participant in an improvement approach
  • Teachable moments.  Much of the information overload is due to etiquette and culture.  It’s been said that you can’t force changes in culture, but there are certainly cases where culture has drastically changed.  Part of the answer lies in exploiting teachable moments to make positive changes in counterproductive communication and information management behaviors.
  • If you’re in a business publication, talk about systematic changes that can improve the efficiency of a large number of workers rather than just personal tips on how any one person interested can help themselves.  What can executives and owners of communication systems do that is more than what any one individual worker can do?

2009 Prediction: There Will Be Pronouncement That Unnecessary Interruptions and Information Overload Tops $1 Trillion ($1,000,000,000,000)

February 17, 2009 at 5:05 pm | In Attention Management, Information Work, etiquette, interruption science, knowledge management | 4 Comments

Commentators and average folk alike were aghast as the amount of the financial bailout crept towards the $1 trillion mark.  But as Congress backed away into sub-$800bn territory (for now), another cost is likely to be announced that beats them to this lofty mark: the cost of information overload.

These Basex figures get quoted a lot in the press and, while I do believe that many people and organizations do suffer from information overload, I’m not buying into attempts to quantify it and certainly not at a price tag of $1,000,000,000,000.  In fact, I think there’s long term harm from trying to get people to act by shocking them with inflated numbers.  Just look at knowledge management.  KM was a real issue and worthy cause too, before it was done in by money-losing attempts to recover the huge dollar estimates of its inefficiencies.

How do I know this pronouncement is coming?  I’ve been following their stats on “unnecessary interruptions” for some time.  They went from $588 billion in 2005 (for interruptions without the “unnecessary” tag) to $650 billion in 2007 (you’d think the number would decrease when just the unnecessary ones are counted, but it jumped up instead).  In December, they posted a blog entry saying

According to our latest research Information Overload costs the U.S. economy a minimum of $900 billion per year in lowered employee productivity and reduced innovation.  Despite its heft, this is a fairly conservative number and reflects the loss of 25% of the knowledge worker’s day to the problem.  The total could be as high as $1 trillion.

I’ll have to examine that new research more.  How do the interruption and information overload numbers intersect?  Are they separate (totalling $1.6 trillion?) or are interruptions part of information overload (which makes sense, but then why is the umbrella number smaller than the 28% of worker’s day previously quoted for interruptions?).

If the $1 trillion figure is anything like the $650bn number I’m not going to buy it.  I haven’t seen a full disclosure on their methodology for workplace interruptions, but from what I could glean there were potentially several techniques used to generate a large number:

1. Lumping in social interactions and distractions with interruptions

Just lump all time wasting annoyances, distractions, and socializing in with the more scientific-sounding “interruptions” and you’ll get a pretty big number. Or better yet, don’t define interruption in any strict sense and survey takers will do the lumping for you. You’ll be able to lump 28% of the average information worker’s day into this category.

2. By counting all costs and no benefits (quote “total cost” instead of “net cost”)

How do you lose $10,000 at blackjack while walking out with the same $100 you went in with?  Simple, just tally up all the losing hands and ignore the winning hands.  Play 200 hands at $100 per hand, win half and lose half, and you’ll come out even.  But that means you lost $10,000 (the total of the 100 losing hands)!

If you don’t like the blackjack analogy, then plug in your own one-side-of-the-coin analogy.  How about totaling up just the expenses on a large company’s income statement without subtracting it from revenue and being shocked at how big the number is and the potential that even a small amount of improvement in that number could make?

One non-Basex study I saw asked how many interruptions people had, then assumed 50% of them were unnecessary based on other research.  Fine, but then interruptions as a whole average out, don’t they?  You can still optimize – a company that’s at break-even can always reduce costs, but the size of the total cost pool is not the issue then.  It counted all the losing hands (calling them “unnecessary”) and ignored the winners.  The implication is that you can keep all the necessary ones and chip away at the unnecessary ones, but who is involved in judging an interruption as “‘unnecessary?”

3. By ignoring closed-loop analysis

Here’s a surefire way to double the $10,000 in losses I quoted in #2.  Just interview everyone at the table (you and the dealer) and add up all their losses.  Since the half I lost was $10,000 and the half the dealer lost was $10,000, that’s $20,000 in total losses at that table.  But we both came away even!

Basex went to some effort to quantify “unnecessary” as not urgent, not important, could have been done another way, etc.  But if you ask individuals this instead of both sides of each transaction, you’re just interviewing the dealer and the player about their blackjack losses and forgetting that quite often one wins when the other loses.  Almost every possible model I can think of for interruptions (see interruption patterns) results in one of the parties involved losing on the deal, so pretty much every interruption will be counted as unnecessary by someone and without closed-loop analysis almost every interruption will get incorrectly totaled.

You need to do closed loop analysis – treating each interruption as an interaction between the interrupter and those interrupted and determining, as a whole, if it was useful to the organization.  Most interruptions are useful to someone, or why would they do it (I propose only a small proportion are careless etiquette transgressions)?  If it’s a matter of self-important timing on the part of the interrupter, consider if there is ever really a “good” time you could push these interruptions to.

4. By playing loose with the definition of “unnecessary”

Reversing a question can help validate it.  In this case, ask the question from the other side to see if you get the same answer.  Ask each survey taker how many times they interrupted someone else that day and how many of those were unnecessary.  If the interrupter thinks it was necessary, shouldn’t a conservative estimate give them the benefit of the doubt?  I predict the difference in results between the question that yields $900bn and this one would be enormous.  Only a small portion would be because the interrupter forgets they interrupted someone – the rest is the inaccuracy of the methodology.

In common parlance, any unnecessary activity interrupts a necessary one you’re working on.  Have to stop working on your coding to go to a stupid meeting?  That meeting interrupted your coding.  That’s 1 hour of interruption plus 15 minutes to get back to what I was doing.  If I decide to take a break and look at email, and then get sidetracked by a dumb one?  The email “interrupted” me unnecessarily.  If you want to let survey takers count all unnecessary activities as “unnecessary interruptions” that’s fine, but throwing interruption technology and etiquette solutions against the general problem of business inefficiency is like throwing a pebble at a wall to knock it down.  The survey definitions and the solutions have to use the same definition of “unnecessary”.

5. By comparing against perfect short-term productivity instead of long-term sustainable productivity

Yes, people take breaks and, being social creatures, they often interrupt others to do it with them.  People need breaks.  Even the best runners have to pace themselves for a marathon.  I calculated that optimal performance for the best marathon runner is obtained by running at only about half speed.  What if you spend a bunch of time and effort getting people to eliminate certain time-wasting habits, and they just re-fill that time with other habits because they need or want that time?  It may be worth figuring that out before throwing a lot of time and money away.

So you’ve figured out by now that I don’t buy the $900 billion number and I certainly won’t when it hits a trillion.  Maybe the surprising part if you don’t regularly read my blog is that I’m very much a believer that attention management is a very useful approach and that organizations and individuals can take real steps to manage their attention better (for enterprises see my Enterprise Attention Management conceptual architecture; for individuals my Personal Attention Management tips).  But I also believe in having an accurate picture of costs and benefits.

Another techno-cultural topic I believe in is knowledge management.  KM’s basis tenets were sound- that knowledge (or at least “information” if you don’t want to sound too pompous about it) is an asset just like a factory or an employee and needs to be managed as such.  But KM became a dirty word after a few years of consultants exaggerating the size of the problem and what could be done about it.  It’s taken about a decade for KM to get back on its feet, and only now under new names so as not to arouse those burnt on KM before.  I don’t want this to happen to attention management and information overload too.  It’s a real problem, but a complex one that is impossible to pin a real number on.  And it has real solutions too that can help when recognized problems exist – if you don’t promise too much.

Note: This version has been updated due to a helpful comment from Mark Worth pointing out the shift from quoting “unnecessary interruptions” to “information overload”.

Those Lazy Marathon Runners

February 3, 2009 at 12:55 pm | In Attention Management, Information Work, interruption science | 1 Comment

There’s a typical news and commentary pattern where a story or posting about a corporation cracking down on non-work distractions (like checking Blackberries, accessing shopping websites, March Madness pools) is followed by a stream of rebuttals about how everyone needs a break and that being mentally rested, happy, and socially connected to peers actually makes them more efficient over the long run.  The key concept here is pacing.

I’m sure most of you can remember a time when you had to leave work at exactly 5:00 but still had a bunch of work to complete at 4:30.  I’ll bet you were amazingly focused and productive in that 30 minutes!  Even to the point you were pretty proud at how efficient you can be.  Now, why don’t you just work like that every hour, every day?  If your boss watched you for those 30 minutes, would they have a right to expect you to work at your peak efficiency all the time?  That’s a good reason to keep your door closed – you couldn’t do it.

A Basex study said 28% of a typical information worker’s day is spent on “interruptions by things that aren’t urgent or important”.  Is that bad?  What’s the correct number?  Trick question – I don’t think 0% is as optimal as it sounds. 

This thought got me wondering if there’s a way to quantify how much better someone could work at peak efficiency and what the “correct” amount of slack-off is assuming you are optimizing for the long-run and not a very short-term burst that leads to burnout.  Ding! Olympic runners!  How much “slack” is there between the fastest a person can run for a short distance and the actual time they run to finish a long-distance race (the marathon) in optimal time?

The world record for the marathon is by Samuel Wanjiru at 2:06:32.  I calculated that at any given 100 meters during the marathon, he was running it in 17.99 seconds.  The world record for the 100 meter dash is held by Usain Bolt at 9.69 seconds.  There are even huge football players that run the 100 meter dash in under 12 seconds.  That lazy Wanjiru!  And Bolt has to start his 100m from a standstill too.  That means Wanjiru is running at only 54% of maximum speed (I’ll assume for the sake of argument that, if he wanted to, Wanjiru could run a fast sprint even though runners are better at different lengths). 

By my calculations, Usain Bolt could run the marathon in 1:08:09. That’s enough time to run the marathon, take a shower, and watch two episodes of the Simpsons (without commercials) before Wanjiru met him at the finish line.

Except, of course, that Bolt would keel over long before hitting the finish line at that rate.  It’s important to pace yourself.  Seeing as Wanjiru is the best marathon runner on the planet and that is the fastest time recorded, I can safely assume his time is the optimal compromise between speed and endurance. That pacing requires throttling back to almost half speed.

What is the relation between physical and mental endurance?  Is “pacing” needed to optimize long-running mental tasks as it is with physical ones?  I think it is.  While I can remember some painfully long mental sprints at times, truly long tasks require some mental pacing as well.  And just like sprinters, breaks between sprints are what make the sprints more effective. 

So some advice to those people that calculate how much those non-work distractions are costing companies (sometimes calling them “unnecessary interruptions”), implying that’s the amount of benefit out there to take back a piece of: look to the long-term finish line, not the isolated moments in the day.  If optimal physical pacing is 54% of maximum short-term capability, maybe 28% isn’t a bad pace for mental efforts.  Or, given the number of goof-offs out there, maybe it’s 25% or 22% that’s optimal – but don’t imply it’s 0%.  So don’t watch an information worker doing 5 minutes of web shopping or a marathon runner for just 100 yards and conclude they aren’t giving it their all.

Email Overload: A Little Help From Microsoft

August 28, 2008 at 9:23 am | In Attention Management, Information Work, interruption science | Leave a Comment

In June, Google announced an “Email addict” feature that was kind of a gag response to people complaining about email overload.  When you press a “take a break” button, the screen turns gray and locked the user out of email until you clicked again.  I had posted my own suggestions of how an email tool could help with email overload at http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/2008/06/08/google-lands-crushing-blow-to-email-addiction-with-new-feature/.

I was just turned on to Email Prioritizer from Office Labs which seems like a nice (and real) response to Google’s gag approach with its “Email Addict” feature. It hits on one of the features I wrote about: mail arrival schedules. I’d also recommend that Microsoft add automated scheduling options (hourly, morning/noon/evening, etc) to the manual option provided. This would simulate the cycle of the postman coming to deliver the mail, and leave your brain free outside those times to concentrate.

One nit: the description of the tool on their website annoyingly equated “do not disturb” as allowing you to “work without interruptions”. Unless you have toasts turned on email doesn’t interrupt you. And if that bothers you, the feature is already there to turn them off. I’d say email is a distraction or a temptation, not an interruption. The reason I’m picky is that there is a lot of great research around “interruption science” (for example, see interruptions.net) that mostly can’t help or doesn’t apply to this situation.  One needs different approaches and has different goals and metrics when dealing with distractions versus interruptions.

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