Respect the headphones. It’s not rude. It’s work. (Image Source)

The open-office has spawned a far greater problem than just a noisy working environment. Co-workers feel entitled to walking up to your desk and interrupting your work flow. Often they preface their question with an apology, but it does not carry much weight. Maybe the question is brief and only takes a few minutes to answer, or even just a few seconds. But, does that make the interruption any less costly?

There was an interesting study conducted in 1999 called The Influence of Task Interruption on Individual Decision Making: An Information Overload Perspective. Researchers conducted two experiments investigating how interruptions impacted decision making. It turns out, interruptions were found to improve decision making performance! How is that possible? Well, this was only true for simple tasks. Decision making performance dropped substantially for complex tasks. Performance suffered even more as the interruptions grew in frequency and became more dissimilar to the primary task.

…even “helpful interruptions,” those that facilitated completion of simple tasks, were perceived negatively by decision makers. This negative perception could well manifest itself in more traditional work-related concepts such as stress and job satisfaction.

Indeed. Interruptions are so frequent in the workplace now, you can feel when they’re about to happen. Someone will walk up and stand next to you and try and catch your eye. You may have headphones on, but you’re not completely unaware of your surroundings. In those moments you try to make up for the potential of an interruption by working faster while trying to maintain the same level of quality. What kind of job satisfaction does this lend itself to? Can you feel proud of the thing you built or accomplished when you had to cut corners because of the chance of being interrupted? Even as far back as 1999 there was growing concern over the rapid adoption of open-office environments.

Many organizations are creating open workflow offices to better support the flexibility, responsiveness, and global nature of today’s business environment, and it is likely that these business characteristics will be magnified in the future. Open workflow environments are, however, quite likely to result in increased frequency of interruptions over other office configurations. Therefore, interruptions are unlikely to be “managed away” by restructuring work environments and must be addressed using other mechanisms.

The Bose acoustic noise cancelling headphones are fantastic admittedly, however they hardly act as a deterrent anymore. The more you advance in an organization, the more in-demand your time is and the less time you spend on doing the great work the company initially hired you to do. You are “managed away” from doing the thing that you are great at. The researchers did however note what they deemed to be a limitation in this experiment.

Here, an interruption mimicked a face-to-face interruption as subjects were forced to attend to the interruption at the expense of the primary task. How- ever, the interruption could not convey social characteristics such as the status of the interrupter. Therefore, the restricted types of interruptions used in this study should be taken into account prior to generalizing these results across work environments.

Does the status really matter though? Doesn’t the interruption produce the same result no matter what the status of the issue is? What you were working on certainly did not matter to whomever interrupted you. It did not matter that your time is limited. It did not matter that your calendar looks like an unfortunate game of Tetris with color coded meeting blocks sprinkled throughout your week. It’s not fair to the person being interrupted or the person interrupting. Neither task will get the attention that it deserves in a way that is amiable and conducive to doing great work.