By closely monitoring workers in-situ, it was found that people switched activities (conversations, work on computer applications, phone calls) about every three minutes on average. At a less-granular level, when activities were clustered into tasks, or “working spheres,” these were found to be interrupted or switched about every 11 minutes [16]. There is a relationship of length of time on task and interruptions: the longer time spent in a working sphere, the longer is the interrupting event. It has been proposed that when interruptions are used as breaks, then such longer interruptions might
...more
