Email, IM, voicemail, cell phone, carrier pigeon. We still need productivity studies?
Tags :Rant
I read a short
article by Michael Osterman (Osterman
Research) in Network World. He has some reader feedback on productivity
and interruptions from email and IM.
Firstly, instant messaging
(IM) is an interruption. If you are doing work requiring concentration,
it requires a significant time to become productive at the original task
again. Programming shops estimate this time at between 5 and 15 minutes.
E-mail does not have this problem to anything like the same degree, since
it is essentially ignored during periods of concentration. Secondly, opening
an e-mail is part of a sorting process. You can't generally assess whether
an e-mail is important until you've opened it.
I don't necessarily agree that ti takes
anywhere near 5 to 15 minutes to be productive. Plus learn to turn
yourself off (that also means marked busy) from these tings. Are
you required to answer every call, every email and every chat all the time
at that exact moment? Nope. I couldn't find it anywhere in
our company handbook, what about yours?
So a quick survey, are you required to
act immediately on most (I use this because there are incident tickets
and some other things) email and instant messages? Do you do it because
it is there? Do you actually take 5-15 minutes to get back on task?
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On Monday, March 13th, 2006 by Chris Miller
