Fractured Attention
What is multitasking, really, but interrupting one thing to do another? According to Maggie Jackson in Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, we’re living in a “split-focused world” and our “culture of lost threads” is stealing time and concentration in the workplace to the tune of $650 billion in lost U.S. productivity. Ponder these stats:

• On average, an office worker when interrupted takes 25 minutes to get back on task, and one-third of the time, they never do.
• A typical information worker’s day can be broken down as follows: 28% Unnecessary Distractions; 25% Productive Content; 20% In Meetings; 15% Searching Through Content (emails and web searching); 12% Thinking and Reflecting.
• In a day, the typical information worker turns to email 50 times, instant messaging 77 times and visits 40 different websites.
• The average number of corporate emails sent and received per day is projected to rise from today’s 156 messages to 228 by the year 2011. One reason for the increase is “Snam,” junk email generated by social and business-networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook.

Experts aren’t suggesting a return to pre-internet days, but they are encouraging companies to issue policies and explore software solutions to help office workers minimize distractions. Some ideas: Email Addict from Google’s GMail Labs, software that shuts down computer at timed intervals for forced breaks; PriceWatherHouseCoopers’ software that discourages employees from sending weekend emails to colleagues, by a pop-up that asks, “Can this wait until Monday?” and email triage programs that rank messages on a scale of 1-100 for importance. For workers in need of radical help, we suggest an echo-free chamber from Orfield Labs, awarded “Quietest Place on Earth” by Guinness World Records.

Source: Ode, July/August 2008; Ad Age, 6/2/08; Business Week, 6/23/08; Trend Letter, July 2008; Basex, a business research company