Information exchange and task coordination are often achieved by group members interrupting each other through face-to-face or computer-mediated communication. At any moment of work, among all the tasks a person is involved in, there typically is a set of primary tasks that are of higher priority and demand more cognitive control and attentiveness to produce meaningful results. To maintain workflow, workers need to resume primary tasks in a timely fashion after an interruption, whether from a team member or self-initiated. However, task resumption is becoming increasingly difficult given the fragmentation of work.
For group work, failure to resume tasks is not only directly attributed to unmanaged group interruptions, but also in turn impedes the completion of cooperative work. After all, it is these individuals who need to manage his/her own share of work and keep up with schedules in order to collectively advance the group’s work. Thus, a successful and efficient cooperative environment should also incorporate assistive techniques that maintain personal working efficiency within the inevitable interruptions associated with group work.
Interruption at workplaces
Researchers of communication and interruptions have been studying their negative effects for many years. Not only do interruptions create difficulties for maintaining task flow, they also cause stress and frustration. Constant interruptions often lead to discontinuity of primary tasks and procrastination. Existing intervention methods in group work contexts include minimizing occurrences of interruptions by either controlling notifications or broadcasting the individual’s availability in order to regulate mutual interruptions between group members. However, filtering or delaying the arrival of interruptions could result in missing important messages and losing the optimal timing for dealing with the interruptions. So, changing your status to “busy” or “unavailable” is kind of a double edged sword. While you may be able to concentrate on your primary tasks, you will probably miss critical messages from your team.
Failure to resume at the right time
Common to both external and self-interruptions, a critical moment in an interruption cycle is when the interrupting task is completed, or its urgency has been contained, and thus the person is supposed to return to primary tasks. However, numerous factors influence a worker’s decision making at this moment, including environmental characteristics and individuals’ cognitive limitations.
Subtle Cues
First, the opportune timing for resumption is usually not well defined. For example, a person browsing Facebook feeds often does not have a clear cue signaling the proper end of the activity. On the other hand, ending a conversation and hanging-up the phone clearly signals the end of a phone call interruption. In cases like Facebook browsing, it often depends on the person to be aware of the time to end that task. Different people have different ways of defining how much time is too much for deferring task resumption. In other cases, interruptions are cascaded in such a way that resumption cues for previous interruptions are shadowed by new interruptions and old interruptions are never returned to.
Ego Depletion
Second, people need to be sufficiently alert to cues and fully motivated to control their behaviors to complete the resumption. Research in self-control indicates that this critical cognitive resource for self-regulation diminishes over time, which is coined as “Ego Depletion”. Researcher further reveals that lack of motivation and dampening of attention are the culprits for the failure of self-control. When people are less motivated to exert self-control, they pay more attention to cues that meet their predominant response tendencies. With low motivation and divided attention, especially at later stages of task execution, information workers become more susceptible to impulsive tendencies to go off-task.
Disruptive Environment
Third, working environments nowadays increasingly enable self-indulgence, which does a disservice to self- regulation. Part of the reason why resumption cues are too subtle to catch can be attributed to the principles of modern information system design, which emphasize capturing user attention and indulging continuous browsing. Techniques like push notifications, shortcuts, and related links all try to encourage frequent visits and extended stays on these information services, which in many cases are entirely off-task. Group working environments such as open cubicles also result in a higher interruption rate.
Persuasion Strategies
Another factor concerns the persuasion strategy for motivation. Operant Conditioning theory in behavioral change uses the general category of “punishment” and “reward” as two basic persuasion strategies. Punishment emphasizes negative feedback for unfavorable behaviors while reward emphasizes giving positive feedback for favorable behaviors. Liu and Jia’s study in 2014 tests which of the two general strategies could have a larger effect on task resumption. Their results show that the punishment strategy produced significantly faster resumption while also inducing significantly higher subjective stress levels and subjective time pressure. It indicates the double-bladed effect of using the punishment method: it has higher effectiveness but also creates higher pressure on users.
Some tips:
- Structure your day. Make a to-do list for the day and put it somewhere visible. It may help you be aware of the primary task “all the time”
- Set a specific amount of time aside to browse facebook, or read articles on Medium, and use an alarm to notify you when your time is up
- Use “stay focused” tools to help you. Some blocking apps are designed to help the user to stay focused on their work in a friendly manner. For example, the “Forest” iOS app
- Reward yourself for completing a major primary task by giving yourself a specific amount of leisure / distraction time. That way, you only go off task after it has been completed.
Now get back to work! ; )
