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The cost of email interruption
Abstract
The use of email by employees at the Danwood Group was studied and it was found that the interrupt effect from emails is more than generally believed. Employees allowed themselves to be interrupted almost as frequently as telephone calls and the common reaction to the arrival of an email is to react almost as quickly as they would respond to telephone calls. This means the interrupt effect is comparable with that of a telephone call. The recovery time from an email interruption was found to be significantly less than the published recovery time for telephone calls. It is to be concluded, therefore, that while Email is still less disruptive than the telephone, the way the majority of users handle their incoming email has been shown to give far more interruption than expected. By analysing the data captured the authors have been able to create recommendations for a set of guidelines for email usage within the workplace that will increase employee efficiency by reducing the prominence of interruptions, restricting the use of email-to-all messages, setting-up the email application to display three lines of the email and to check for email less frequently. It is recommended that training should be given to staff on how to use email more effectively to increase employee productivity.
... Stimuli congestion does not lead not only to procrastination but what is more it leads to decreasing work efficiency and in final account to financial losses. Jackson et al. (2001) describe that email messages do have some disruptive effect by interrupting the user -more than is generally assumed. Approximately every five minutes an average office worker gets an email. ...
... Compared to common opinion that workers will read the emails in his free time (DeMarco T. and Lister T. 1999), in actual fact they read en email in six seconds after mail announcing. In comparison to the telephone call recovery time for email is just a little over a minute while for telephone it is nearly 15 minutes (Jackson et al. 2000) But when taking into account the amount of incoming emails and the incoming frequency, one minute recovery time will be significant when accumulated over a whole day (Jackson et al., 2001). ...
The population ageing and the employment of older workers is one of the most discussed issues of recent times. But who is the older employee? What determines the difference between whether a worker is still young or already belongs to the category of older employees? The employment of older people is associated with a number of stereotypes. The aim of the paper is to evaluate respondents' view of who is an older employee. Respondents were asked what are the factors based on which they consider a person as an older. The aobtained data are processed through a grounded theory method. The research sample consists of 520 respondents who are divided into 3 age groups. The results of a questionnaire survey of ageing factors are discussed.
... Stimuli congestion does not lead not only to procrastination but what is more it leads to decreasing work efficiency and in final account to financial losses. Jackson et al. (2001) describe that email messages do have some disruptive effect by interrupting the user -more than is generally assumed. Approximately every five minutes an average office worker gets an email. ...
... Compared to common opinion that workers will read the emails in his free time (DeMarco T. and Lister T. 1999), in actual fact they read en email in six seconds after mail announcing. In comparison to the telephone call recovery time for email is just a little over a minute while for telephone it is nearly 15 minutes (Jackson et al. 2000) But when taking into account the amount of incoming emails and the incoming frequency, one minute recovery time will be significant when accumulated over a whole day (Jackson et al., 2001). ...
Seniors belong to the segment, whose share in the population has been annually increasing. The object of the article is a detailed analysis of the standards of living of Czech seniors in various aspects of material and immaterial nature. With the use of data from the database EU-SILC it was made effective monitoring, in-depth findings of Czech seniors standards of living: an analysis of the income situation of households and the elderly, assessment of the employment situation, analysis of poverty and people at risk of
poverty using the Gini coefficient and the coefficient of income inequality. Furthermore, theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are being discussed
... Because it is so common, researchers have extensively studied and conceptualized interruption throughout the history of psychology. Interruption has been elaborated within various contexts such as memory [2][3][4], recovery of attention [5][6][7], learning [8], emotion [9], motivation [10], organizational behavior [11,12], and so on. Some notable studies have found that interruption promotes better recall [2], creates a tendency or urge to return to the unfinished task [13], produces emotional behaviors [9,14,15], can evoke anxiety [12,14,16], or even spark positive feelings [12,17]. ...
Interruptions are a part of our everyday lives. They are inevitable in complex societies, especially when many people move from one place to another as a part of their daily routines. The main aim of this research is to understand the effects of interruptions on individuals from a psychological and crowd dynamics perspective. Two studies were conducted to investigate this issue, with each focusing on different types of interruptions and examining their psychological (emotion, motivation, arousal) and physiological (heart rate) components. Study 1 examined interruptions in a video game setting and systematically varied goal proximity (N = 61). It was hypothesized that being interrupted in the later stages of goal pursuit would create a high aroused impatience state, while interruptions in the earlier stages would produce a low aroused boredom state. However, the results showed that the hypothesized groupwise differences were not observed. Instead, interruptions created annoyance in all conditions, both psychologically and physiologically. Study 2 investigated interruptions in pedestrian crowds (N = 301) and used a basic motivational dichotomy of high and low motivation. In the experiments, crowds (80-100 participants) were asked to imagine that they were entering a concert hall consisting of a narrow bottleneck. The low motivation group reported feeling bored during the interruption, while the high motivation group reported feeling impatient. Additionally, a motivational decrease was observed for the high motivation group due to the interruption. This drop in motivation after the interruption is also reflected in the measured density (person/m2) in front of the bottleneck. Overall, both studies showed that interruption can have significant effects on individuals, including psychological and physiological impacts. The observed motivational decrease through interruption is particularly relevant for crowd management, but further investigation is needed to understand the context-specific effects of interruptions.
... When interruptions are caused by, or attributable to the use of technology (e.g., e-mail notifications), research refers to them as interruptions that are induced by technology [45]. While common technologies, such as phone calls or e-mails, can interrupt office workers up to 70 times a day [46,47], they lose a third of their workday as a result [48,49]. Therefore, interruptions are mostly considered as negative events which can impair the performance of work activities [50] by reducing productivity, adding load due to additional tasks, or disrupting ongoing work processes [51]. ...
The digital transformation of work has long since arrived in our everyday lives. The crisis-driven digital transformation through COVID-19 undoubtedly accelerated many things and acted as a burning glass for processes that had not yet been digitally transformed. This dissertation is dedicated to the fundamental digital transformation of work and, with a total of fifteen research studies, to the framework of the crisis-driven digital transformation of work, among others. With reference to the framework concepts of "Transformation Governance", "Digital Leadership" and "Future Technology Management", approaches are identified on how to close the theoretical and practical gap regarding the digital transformation of work.
Organizational, individual, and technical approaches are identified as prerequisites for the successful digital transformation of work. The findings will enable future research to investigate current and emerging phenomena, such as issues of collaboration in virtual realities and fostering cohesion in purely virtual teams. Methodologically, established approaches such as interviews, case studies, surveys, experimental and mixed methods approaches are combined. Therefore, the dissertation can provide a starting point for discussion, but also for further research in the field of business informatics and in other disciplines. Furthermore, this work provides valuable insights and recommendations for action for experts, especially in SMEs, who want to face the digital transformation.
... Physicians experience frequent interruptions of various types in a broad range of settings during tasks related to patient care [12]. Interruptions include human communication and electronic ones [13,14]. Emergency physicians and primary-care physicians are interrupted on average 9.7 and 3.9 times per hour, respectively [15]. ...
Background
Diagnostic error is a major source of patient suffering. Researchshows that physicians experience frequent interruptions while being engaged with patients and indicate that diagnostic accuracy may be impaired as a result. Since most studies in the field are observational, there is as yet no evidence suggesting a direct causal link between being interrupted and diagnostic error. Theexperiments reported in this article were intended to assess this hypothesis.
Methods
Three experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that interruptions hurt diagnostic reasoning and increase time on task. In the first experiment (N = 42), internal medicine residents, while diagnosing vignettes of actual clinical cases were interrupted halfway with a task unrelated to medicine, solving word-spotting puzzles and anagrams. In the second experiment (N = 78), the interruptions were medically relevant ones. In the third experiment (N = 30), we put additional time pressure on the participants. In all these experiments, a control group diagnosed the cases without interruption. Dependent variables were diagnostic accuracy and amount of time spent on the vignettes.
Results
In none of the experiments interruptions were demonstrated to influence diagnostic accuracy. In Experiment 1: Mean of interrupted group was 0.88 (SD = 0.37) versus non- interrupted group 0.91 (SD = 0.32). In Experiment 2: Mean of interrupted group was 0.95 (SD = 0.32) versus non-interrupted group 0.94 (SD = 0.38). In Experiment 3: Mean of interrupted group was 0.42 (SD = 0.12) versus non-interrupted group 0.37 (SD = 0.08). Although interrupted residents in all experiments needed more time to complete the diagnostic task, only in Experiment 2, this effect was statistically significant.
Conclusions
These three experiments, taken together, failed to demonstrate negative effects of interruptions on diagnostic reasoning. Perhaps physicians who are interrupted may still have sufficient cognitive resources available to recover from it most of the time.
... For example, Cutrell et al. (2000) found that interrupting users during a task's "planning phase" reduced completion time relative to interruptions during other tasks. Jackson et al. (2001) found that e-mail interruptions are less disruptive than phone calls. Therefore, one can presume that interruption will be considered a disturbance if it includes signals that distinguish it and break the continuity of the performed task. ...
Bulk email is widely used in organizations to communicate messages to employees. It is an important tool in making employees aware of policies, events, leadership updates, etc. However, in large organizations, the problem of overwhelming communication is widespread. Ineffective organizational bulk emails waste employees' time and organizations' money, and cause a lack of awareness or compliance with organizations' missions and priorities. This thesis focuses on improving organizational bulk email systems by 1) conducting qualitative research to understand different stakeholders; 2) conducting field studies to evaluate personalization's effects on getting employees to read bulk messages; 3) designing tools to support communicators in evaluating bulk emails. We performed these studies at the University of Minnesota, interviewing 25 employees (both senders and recipients), and including 317 participants in total. We found that the university's current bulk email system is ineffective as only 22% of the information communicated was retained by employees. To encourage employees to read high-level information, we implemented a multi-stakeholder personalization framework that mixed important-to-organization messages with employee-preferred messages and improved the studied bulk email's recognition rate by 20%. On the sender side, we iteratively designed a prototype of a bulk email evaluation platform. In field evaluation, we found bulk emails' message-level performance helped communicators in designing bulk emails. We collected eye-tracking data and developed a neural network technique to estimate how much time each message is being read using recipients' interactions with browsers only, which improved the estimation accuracy to 73%. In summary, this work sheds light on how to design organizational bulk email systems that communicate effectively and respect different stakeholders' value.
Worldwide, governments have introduced novel information and communication technologies (ICTs) for policy formulation and service delivery, radically changing the working environment of government employees. Following the debate on work stress and particularly on technostress, we argue that the use of ICTs triggers “digital overload” that decreases government employees’ job satisfaction via inhibiting their job autonomy. Contrary to prior research, we consider job autonomy as a consequence rather than a determinant of digital overload, because ICT-use accelerates work routines and interruptions and eventually diminishes employees’ freedom to decide how to work. Based on novel survey data from government employees in Germany, Italy, and Norway, our structural equation modeling (SEM) confirms a significant negative effect of digital overload on job autonomy. More importantly, job autonomy partially mediates the negative relationship between digital overload and job satisfaction, pointing to the importance of studying the micro-foundations of ICT-use in the public sector.
Background:
The virtual and real worlds of work are increasingly merging through digital transformation. This also applies to products and services. Virtual Reality (VR) with all its learning opportunities is a promising technology to improve workflows and enable transparency between different departments and organizations. This transparency is particularly important when it comes to preventing potentially dangerous work situations.
Objective:
We investigate weaknesses in competence transfer processes between computer-aided designers and service employees connected in a hybrid value chain. On the one hand, designers receive only little feedback, hence are missing necessary evaluation to adjust their designs to empirical specifications. On the other hand, service employees, therefore, work with sometimes impractical machine designs which makes their work on-site unergonomic, dangerous, and more difficult.
Methods:
We present a design science-driven, empirical approach to provide enhanced competence transfer with the help of VR. Thereby, we evaluate a self-developed VR demonstrator with an iterative approach consisting of 60 qualitative interviews.
Results:
The developed VR demonstrator supports interorganizational sharing of (tacit) knowledge by enabling designers to take the service perspective and ensuring collaboration across organizational boundaries. By intentionally using VR technology as an interruption to the work, the design can be viewed from a service perspective and evaluated for occupational safety and health issues.
Conclusions:
The work process improvements achieved by the VR demonstrator enable early consideration of design issues that are particularly relevant to safety, thus ensuring greater occupational safety and health protection in the processes for service employees.
Individuals experience a greater frequency of interruptions than ever before. Interruptions by e-mails, phone calls, texts and other sources of disruption are ubiquitous. We examine the important unanswered question of whether interruptions can increase the likelihood that individuals will choose closure-associated behaviors. Specifically, we explore the possibility that interruptions that occur during the climactic moments of a task or activity can produce a heightened need for psychological closure. When an interruption prevents individuals from achieving closure in the interrupted domain, we show that the resulting unsatisfied need for psychological closure can cause individuals to seek closure in totally unrelated domains. These findings have important implications for understanding how consumer decisions may be influenced by the dynamic – and often interrupted — course of daily events.
Technological developments have increased the opportunity for interleaving between tasks, leading to more interruptions and more choices for users. Three experiments tested the interleaving strategies of users completing simple office-based tasks while adjusting access control privileges to documents. Previous work predicted users would switch tasks to enable them to work on the task that produced the greatest current benefit—they would maximise the marginal rate of return. Results found that by interleaving between tasks users were able to focus on shorter tasks and that the interleaving decisions were consistent with a strategy of maximising the marginal rate of return. However, interruptions from access control tasks disrupted the processing involved in this task management and led to errors in task selection (Experiment 2) and task performance (Experiment 3). Task interleaving can therefore have costs in security contexts where errors can be catastrophic. Understanding which strategies maximise the marginal rate of return could predict users’ task management behaviour.
Research on email overload has mainly focused on email-related predictors and on linking it to stress and productivity. However, only few studies have considered personality traits to explain email overload and no studies to date have examined burnout and work engagement as potential consequences. Hence, this study was conducted (N = 201) to test to which extent Core Self-Evaluations, the Big Five traits and ambition predict email overload beyond email-related predictors. Moreover, the relationship between email overload and burnout/work engagement was examined. Results show that Core Self-Evaluations predict email overload beyond other personality traits and email-related measures. Second, high feelings of email overload and low Core Self-Evaluations are suggested to contribute to higher levels of burnout and low work engagement, beyond other personality traits and control variables. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. This study demonstrated the importance of personality, in particular of Core Self-Evaluations, to explain email overload. Moreover, it strongly indicates that email overload is not only related to productivity but also to burnout and work engagement.
Lectures are designed to deliver new information to a large group of students. Apart from actual lecturing, lecturers may also encourage elaboration of learning material with advanced instructions, like advance organizer, summaries and repetitions as well as questions. Prerequisite to learning from lectures is that students focus on the lecture and cognitively process what is being presented. In today’s lectures, mobile devices, (i.e. laptops and smartphones), may aid students to research additional information online or to take notes, but may also distract students. In this descriptive study, 86 students with 91 mobile devices out of five lectures were observed with respect to how they utilized mobile devices for lecture-related and -unrelated activities. Additionally, we observed 21 lecturers and coded their behavior. The results indicate that lecturing correlates only slightly with student activities. Students use media mostly in a lecture-unrelated way. Giving negative feedback seems to foster students’ lecture-unrelated media use.
The influx of technology into the classroom presents a serious challenge for educators and researchers. One of the greatest challenges is to better understand, given our knowledge of the demands of dual tasking, how the distraction posed by this technology influences educational outcomes. In the present investigation we explore the impact of engaging in computer mediated non-lecture related activities (e.g., email, surfing the web) during a lecture on attention to, and retention of, lecture material. We test a number of predictions derived from existing research on dual tasking. Results demonstrate a significant cost of engaging in computer mediated non-lecture related activities to both attention and retention of lecture material, a reduction in the frequency of mind wandering during the lecture, and evidence for difficulty coordinating attention in lectures with distractions present. Discussion focuses on the theoretical and practical implications of these results for dividing attention in the classroom.