Interruptions during work can drastically affect its quality, a new study shows.
Researchers say that workers in today's job environment are disrupted six times an hour every day at job. In order to find out the kind of quality the employees produce every day, researches recruited participants to write essays on a given topic.
Participants were divided into two groups wherein the first team was interrupted a number of times with an unrelated task during the work and the second team experienced no disruptions.
After the essays were assessed on a numbered scale by independent graders, researchers found that participants who were interrupted scored significantly lower in terms of essay quality compared to the other group.
"People don't realize how disruptive interruptions can be," Cyrus Foroughi, a PhD candidate at George Mason University's human factors and applied cognition program, said in a press release. "There is value in determining whether interruptions affect the quality of the tasks that many people perform regularly, such as writing essays or reports."
"Interruption can cause a noticeable decrement in the quality of work, so it's important to take steps to reduce the number of external interruptions we encounter daily," added Foroughi. "For example, turn off your cell phone and disable notifications such as e-mail while trying to complete an important task."
Researchers noted that participants who were interrupted during the writing phase also wrote significantly fewer words than those in the control group.
The findings of the study, 'Do Interruptions Affect Quality of Work?' were published in the journal Human Factors.
