Why that project is late
Other than “I stayed up all night over a week ago to produce this and I’ve been waiting for help/approval on some things and I got busy with even-more-urgent stuff and OMG SQUIRREL,” this should shed some light on A Lot of Things.
Employees who experienced frequent interruptions reported 9% higher rates of exhaustion — almost as big as the 12% increase in fatigue caused by oversize workloads, according to a survey of 252 working adults published recently in the International Journal of Stress Management. Interruptions also sparked a 4% increase in physical ailments such as migraines or backaches, says the study.
Error rates skyrocket after interruptions. Participants in a recent 300-person study were asked to perform a sequence of computer tasks, such as identifying with a keystroke whether a letter was closer to the start or the end of the alphabet. After even a brief interruption of about 2.8 seconds, when they were asked to type two letters, the subjects made twice as many errors, says the study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
“Two seconds is long enough to make people lose the thread,” says Erik Altmann, a psychology professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing, and the study’s lead author.
To make matters worse, it takes more than 25 minutes, on average, to resume a task after being interrupted. After resuming a complex task such as design or programming, says Tom DeMarco, co-author of “Peopleware,” a book on productivity now in its third edition, it takes an additional 15 minutes to regain the same intense focus or “flow” as before the interruption, based on an 800-employee study for the book.