How distracted are you at work? Would you open your email to read as soon as it arrives in your inbox?
A study by a team of researchers from the University of California found that it doesn’t take much to distract a person from his everyday work. The researchers, Gloria Mark and Victor Gonzalez, tracked 36 information technology office workers at a company to record how they spent their time.
The result? They found that the average time spent by the workers in concentrating on a project before they were distracted was just 11 minutes.
Distraction came in various forms, including incoming emails, the telephone ringing or a knock on the cubicle. Further, the study revealed that once interrupted, a person would take an average of 25 minutes to return to his original task.
More than that, the workers in the study were each juggling with an average of 12 projects at the same time. The researchers called it “constant, multitasking craziness.”
According to Gloria Mark, the five biggest causes of interruption in descending order were a colleague stopping by, the worker being called away from the desk or leaving voluntarily, the arrival of new email, the worker switching to another task on the computer and a telephone call.