Tag Archives: Phone

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 …

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Talking Talks Volumes

Do you recall those experiments with Tin Cans and String?  You remember, where you could hear the person at the other end almost more clearly without the can to your ear? Prior to our marriage, my then fiancée and I spent most of two years 700 miles apart.  As a student, I was skint, so we could only afford the long distance phone calls once each fortnight.  Before the popularisation of the home PC, initially we relied on letters to communicate.  While these had the great advantage of being there to read and re-read (and when you’re in love, re-reading is done a lot), the letter didn’t always convey the nuances that a conversation would communicate.  We decided to experiment with recording a cassette tape to each other once a week.  Once we had got over the initial hurdle of …

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