You’re chatting with them, over the phone say, and every 30 seconds there is like this 10 second pause.

What are they doing? Chatting with someone on IM about (probably) something equally as pressing.

You’re just wasting other people’s time (and possibly your own) when you try to do too many things at once.

Oh and if you’re a coder (like myself), forget about it. You will have about 0-1% “flow” time if you are constantly on IM / etc. during the day.

Web 2.0 and social networking and “connected mode productivity” (nice term! :-) ) are all still being born and I look forward to seeing the new things that they bring forth, which will be no different or less wonderful than new kinds of art or literature; however, I suspect that human beings and the issues that go with them will tend to be the usual ones. We’ll just have interesting and useful new ways to see and do everything.

Thanks, as usual, for the “think,” Anne! (spelling your name correctly this time)

@Lnxwalt: I don’t disagree that there are many work situations in which too many interruptions decrease productivity. But as we move towards mashups, interruptions become less problematic and more beneficial. If we are in an assembly mode vs. creation mode, it’s much easier to context switch because we don’t need to hold so much context in our heads. The prebuilt pieces do that.

It’s similar to using a high-level dynamic language vs. assembler, if you know anything about programming languages. If you come back to machine language after an interruption it’s going to be a lot harder to get back in work mode than if you come back to, say, Python. That’s because Python holds so much more context for you — you don’t have to have it in your head, it’s right there on the screen when you come back to the code.

I am really intrigued that you bring up the issue of command-and-control in this, because I suspect as well that top-down management approaches won’t support connected mode productivity, at least not very well.

Having spent many years working in very interruptive environments, I can assure you that freqent interruptions equates to less accomplished at the end of the day.

For me, the best thing is to turn off the phone and the IM client and the mail client for an hour or two while I work on the highest priority tasks, then catch up with the other tasks before I start on the next level of priority. I have learned that many of your most frequent interrupters can be trained to work within your schedule instead of increasing your stress level by forcing you into their schedules.

The thing about group productivity is that most of the time, it really isn’t group productivity. It is a bunch of people discussing how they should do this or that, while one or two of the people assigned to the team actually do the work and get it turned in. Once it is turned in, a couple of the most prolific discussers will complain that the workproduct does not conform to what the discussers agreed to do. So you see, your college experience really *is* typical in the workplace.

If you actually do find a team where everyone contributes and works, I agree fully… connected mode works far better than a bunch of disconnected individuals. But most workplaces are too Theory X command-and-control-oriented to give employees the autonomy and authority necessary to make connected mode work reliably.

In the one place I have been where this kind of environment was successfully being used, someone higher in the food chain decided that they wanted employees to go back to top-down command-and-control, which killed the group’s combined productivity and work-togetherness.