If you read a few personal productivity articles you’ll run into this advice: Interruptions are bad, so eliminate interruptions. That’s OK as far as it goes. But are interruptions necessarily bad? And when you are interrupted, what can you do to recover faster?
Not all interruptions are created equal. Paul Graham talks about this in his essay Holding a Program in One’s Head.
The danger of a distraction depends not on how long it is, but on how much it scrambles your brain. A programmer can leave the office and go and get a sandwich without losing the code in his head. But the wrong kind of interruption can wipe your brain in 30 seconds.
In her interview with John Udell, Mary Czerwinski points out that while interruptions are detrimental to the productivity of the person being interrupted, maybe 75% of the time interruptions are beneficial for the organization as a whole. If one person is stuck and other person can get them unstuck by answering a question, the productivity of the person asking the question may go up more than the productivity of the person being asked the question goes down.
Given that interruptions are good, or at least inevitable, how can you manage them? Czerwinski uses the phrase context reacquisition to describe getting back to your previous state of mind following an interruption. Czerwinski and others at Microsoft Research are looking at software for context acquisition. For example, one of the ideas they are trying out is software that takes snapshots of your desktop. If you could see what your desktop looked like before the phone rang, it could help you get back into the frame of mind you had before you started helping the person on the other end of the line.
Have you discovered a tool or habit that helps with context reacquisition? If so, please leave a comment.
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David 10.04.11 at 09:42
If I work on hairy things I always work with paper & pencil. That has three important advantages. First, using them involves less overhead than a text editor or a mind-mapping tool.
Secondly, the distractions which occur using computers simply aren’t there.
At last, if you get interrupted, the handwriting and the (perhaps cancelled) bits of information help greatly in restoring one’s thoughts.
PS: The link to Paul Grahams blog is mangled.
John 10.04.11 at 09:54
I definitely think cycles of using a computer and not using a computer are better than using a computer all day.
Thanks for letting me know about the mangled link. I fixed it.