Yesterday’s New York Times magazine explores the interrupted life of the modern office worker (login required). It turns out, as most of us will acknowledge, that distractions don’t interrupt our work, but rather distractions make up the bulk of our work. According to one researcher who measured actual drones doing actual droning:
Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task.
So most of us — and our intended arts audiences — spend our workdays bouncing around from task to task, resulting in what one software executive in the article calls ”continuous partial attention,” where we’re so busy tracking everything, we never focus on anything. And despite our constant complaining about this state of affairs, many workers thrive on the buzz of constant distraction (and perhaps even build their environments to encourage it), since it helps them feel necessary in the world:
This can actually be a positive feeling, inasmuch as the constant pinging makes us feel needed and desired. The reason many interruptions seem impossible to ignore is that they are about relationships — someone, or something, is calling out to us. It is why we have such complex emotions about the chaos of the modern office, feeling alternately drained by its demands and exhilarated when we successfully surf the flood.
It’s a jarring contrast to formal arts experiences, which often require more than 11 minutes of our direct attention. That contrast can either be our selling point (escape distraction, find focus) or the thing that makes us completely foreign to the rest of our audience’s daily lives. Goodness knows that commercial media — television, film, music — haven’t responded to this complexity with serenity, but with even more complexity (ticker news on screen, picture in picture, ever more rapid edits).
Are we offering the arts as an antidote to the interrupted life? And if so, are we structuring our own organizations, communications, and self-evaluations to that goal?
So many arts managers I know are masters of crisis management — so much so that they’ll create a crisis when there isn’t one available. But if our goal is to counter complexity with clarity, we may want to adopt a different work ethic. Perhaps we should all take up Tai Chi.
NOTE: After reading the Times article, I immediately adjusted my e-mail program to check for mail every 30 minutes, rather than every five. Because, honestly, what e-mail is so essential that it can’t wait 25 minutes to be seen?
This article makes an important point about interruptions like email. People actually like to be interrupted by the ping of email. It makes us feel important…someone needs us. What we don’t do is to examine the impact on our productivity. In a training program that we conduct, we survey people at the beginning of the program, asking them a series of question about hom much time they spend on tasks such as answering email, handling backlogs and interruptions etc. What years of surveying tells us is that people spend inordinate amount of time on tasks and little on planning (our average participant in 2004 told us that they spent 32 hours on tasks and 2.4 hours on planning). Why? First, The majority of workers have never stepped back and looked at how they work. If they did, they would seek to minimize interruptions and set up systems, like the article suggested.This would also help them to recognize that better upfront planning, will result in better execution and higher productivity. Second, most need help, including both training and coaching to be more productive, but few know enough to ask.
I believe that we are coming to crucial crossroads. The University of California at Berkeley showed in 2 studies conducted in 1999 and 2003, that new data generated grew by 2.5 times in that period, to 5 Exabytes! There’s a quiet revolution in the workplace as people conclude that they can’t work any more hours to keep. They need something more than the latest technology. They need processes and techniques to help them better manage data…and their lives.
Bob Kustka