Various bloggers including Ross Mayfield and Martin Geddes complain about interruption and its effect on productivity.
- Interruption has a cost beyond switching tasks.
- The most efficient way to get someone's attention happens to be very expensive for others.
- Skype’s problem is that it is highly interruptive.
But what about the effect on creativity? In Empty Words, John Cage wrote:
If there is any experience more than another which conduces to open-mindedness, it is the experience of being bothered by another, of being interrupted by another. ‘We are studying being interrupted.’ Say we do not practise any spiritual discipline. The telephone does it for us. It opens us to the world ‘outside’.
John Cage, Empty Words: Writings ’73–’78 (Wesleyan University Press 1979)
See also Jill Duffy, Everything You Think You Know About Interruptions Is Wrong (Fast Company 20 April 2016), which argues that
Contrary to popular belief, interruptions have been shown to improve productivity, not impede it.
Originally posted 21 May 2005 at http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~rxv/news/2005/05/interruption.htm
Updated and cross-posted 22 April 2016
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