Interrupting yourself can be more disruptive than being interrupted by someone else
By Christian Jarrett
At work or study, whenever you choose to break away from your main task to do something else – such as leaving an email you’re in the middle of writing to go check Facebook instead – you are effectively interrupting yourself. It’s obvious that self-interruptions risk hurting your focus, but you might not realise just how much. A new study in Computers in Human Behaviour shows that in certain contexts interrupting yourself can be even more disruptive than an external interruption, and that it has to do with the brain power that’s needed whenever you make a decision to pause your main task to do something different.
Ioanna Katidioti and her colleagues at the University of Groningen had 28 young adult participants complete a computer task that was designed to simulate a typical work situation in which the primary objective was to answer client emails, while a secondary objective was to participate in a live text chat with a friend. Answering the client emails involved remembering the product the client was enquiring about, looking up the price in a browser, then emailing back the answer. The live chat with a friend involved answering questions about favourite things, like books and restaurants.
To complete each stage of the experiment, the participants were told that they had to answer 10 client emails and exchange 15 chat messages with their friend. The most important detail is that for some stages, the participants chose wh...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: researchdigestblog Tags: Cognition Occupational Technology Source Type: blogs
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