Imagine you just walked into your front door, you had a long day, and whomever you cohabit with asks you if you’d prefer to stay at X hotel or Y hotel when you’re going on a trip later in the year, and why, and also, we’re planning to go for a meal later this month for so-and-so’s birthday, which place should we go which is good food but also not too far from the carpark/train station….

If you’re anything like me, you’d say, “hang on, can I just get in the door, and we can talk about that in a bit?”

This feeling of discomfort is your tired brain going, enough! In our home we call it being face-tussled.

The thing is, this kind of thing is happening all day at work, but we tend not to react the same way, and we should.

In modern workplaces, one consistent finding in studies (we’re quoting from Medium, which sourced from Atlassian) is that interruptions cause the need to context switch, and context switching is difficult, disruptive, tiring, and very bad for business.

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Here are some stats:
  • It can take a staggering 9.5 minutes to regain workflow post-switch. Some other studies even talk about up to 23 minutes. Imagine the cumulative effect of multiple switches in a day.
  • 97.5% of people cannot multitask effectively.
  • The average person is interrupted 31.6 times per day.
  • On average, the loss in cognitive capacity (thus productivity) due to context switching can be upwards of 20%. That is a ‘fifth-day’ practical loss in a typical work week.
  • At least 45% of people self-characterised as less productive while context-switching.

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So, we’re losing productivity & focus when we switch, so are we deciding when we switch? Hell no.

Let’s think about email notifications, hands up for who had the following happen this week - on a teams call or in a meeting where you were talking when a notification popped up on someone’s phone/computer, and the person you were talking to took a cheeky look to see what it was while you kept talking. Were they 100% listening to you at that point? No chance.

Whenever the topic of email/phone interruptions come up in organisations it’s ignored as too small an issue to be concerned with, it’s not sexy enough, it doesn’t have the word “transformation” in it. The data tells a different story and there’s a boat load of cash on offer for those who value focused delivery of quality work.

The issue of why we resist turning off notifications is for another article, but for now if you’re interested in being more productive as a team, person, or organisation, try to turn off email notifications for a day, and see how much more you get done. What you’re effectively doing there is saying, “hang on a bit, can we talk about that a bit later?”

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