Just off a weekend of mind-clearing and snow-shoeing. Nothing else in mind but the placement of one large snow-shoed foot in front of the other (or sometimes to the side), on the snowpath leveled by the 'shoers' ahead of me on the trail. What a wonderful way to clear the mind and soul!
Picking my way through email this morning I found a reference to a study conducted in 2007 which was summarized in this way:
“It takes 15 minutes to fully resume a serious mental task after answering an e-mail or IM.” Iqbal & Horvitz, 2007.
I didn't stop what I was doing at the time, but I did take the time to email it to myself (huh), so that later I could look a little more deeply into this intriguing piece of evidence.
Now it is later. I just looked up the study by Iqbal & Horvitz (googled it and of course the abstract is out there in its entirety).
The study corroborates a lot of recent brain reseach on multi-tasking. This also coincides with my experience, which is why I was attracted to the quote at the first -- I simply cannot do two things at once. If I am trying to do two things at once, well, I am actually just switching back and forth. If we are trying to do something that requires a high level of mental activity, according to the study, this distraction actually takes us so far afield that when we turn back to the original task it actually takes 15 minutes to ramp back up.
How many tasks do we leave undone due to the lure of email and IM? How many of those 15 minute detours do we experience in one day? And what if this desire to do more actually causes us to accomplish less? It seems as if this may be the case.
What to do? First off, perhaps, limit the use of email to periods of time during the day when you are not concentrating on work that requires high levels of mental acuity and concentration. For many of us, this is easier said than done.
But perhaps being more conscious of the effects of this interruption, we will offer ourselves a day a week, or several mornings a week of work time that is uninterrupted by email -- whatever we can begin to carve out, to intentionally concentrate fully on important work.
Giving ourselves the gift of uninterrupted time is bound to benefit us. To help with the completion of well-thought out work. I imagine it will also lend a quality and a level of satisfaction to the work that is often missing when we are interrupted repeatedly.
Now, when I hear my 'you've got mail' chime, I intend to react differently, by not reacting at all. I'll avoid that 'detour' and tune it out until I am ready to take a break, maintaining my reverence to the work at hand.
It brings a smile to my face, just thinking about what that will be like!
Kerry,
May I suggest you turn that chime off, as itself is an interruption to your thought process.
Tom
Posted by: Tom McMahon | March 07, 2011 at 05:41 PM