Tag Archives: Gloria Mark
The art of interruption
I confess. I do remember, once, that when an email arrived, I stopped what I was doing to look at it. (I may have conveniently forgotten the 11,999 other occasions over the past 15 years when I’ve done the same thing.) A friend of mine discovered that when he needs to work on a specific project, or to respond to a large number of emails, that it is more effective to drive 15 minutes home from work, work uninterrupted for an hour, then drive back to the office – because interruptions are such an issue in his workplace. An interesting study conducted by Gloria Mark associate professor at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and a leading expert on work found that it took 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return …