The Laws of Distraction

Law 1/ Workers spend, on average, about 10 minutes on a task before being interrupted by either an external source (56 percent of the time) or self-interruption (44 percent of the time), reports University of California, Irvine, psychologist Gloria Mark. “And it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds for people to return to the original task.” Making progress even more chaotic, Mark notes that 40 percent of the time, workers don’t return to their original task at all.

Law 2/ According to researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, when workers are juggling multiple tasks, their IQ falls 10 points.

Law 3/ We are much less aware of our visual world than we think. Daniel Simons at the Visual Cognition Laboratory, University of Illinois, has marvelously funny videos that demonstrate ways in which we might be talking to a stranger, get distracted, and continue the conversation with another stranger  — and never notice that it’s a different person. The real world, at any given moment, is probably much more distracting than we can fathom — and we regularly interact with more people than we can hope to remember.

Karen Leland’s new book is Time Management in an Instant: 60 Ways to Make the Most of Your Day (Career Press 2008).