The Disruption of Interruption

We must regain our focus and concentration on the long task!

The Study

A worker performance study was conducted by Hewlett-Packard in which they divided workers into two groups.

In the first group the workers were told that as they completed their tasking, they would be shielded from interruptions.

The second group of workers were instructed to do their tasking with an additional load of emails and phone calls that they needed to respond to (similar to how most of us live these days).

The Assessment

At the end of the work cycle, they tested the IQ’s of the individual workers in both groups.

Workers within the group that had not been interrupted scored on average 10 points higher than the group that was faced with constant interruption.

The Conclusion

To relate how big an effect this is, if you smoke cannabis and get stoned, your IQ goes down by 5 points. So being distracted by interruptions is twice as bad as getting stoned and you’d be better off sitting at your desk getting stoned and doing one task at a time rather than attempting to do multiple tasks.