Following to Jonathan Spira’s  post about interrputions, there was a fascinating article in the New York Times yesterday.  Collaboration is not mentioned but makes an appearance as its ugly stepchild: distraction.  Gloria Mark at the University of California at Irvine did a study that observed and tracked office employees work patterns and found:

But the same study found that the interruptions are usually critical to getting the job done.  If the interruptions are the main parts where you interact with your colleagues (other than scheduled meetings, I suppose, which also interrupt, but less frequently), then a big part of collaboration is interruption.  The article goes on to propose that one of the reasons why we make ourselves so vulnerable to interruptions is that it makes us feel wanted and fulfills a base need for human interaction.  Linda Stone, a software executive now at Microsoft, is quoted as saying:

He wasn’t talking about interruptions, but this reminded me of James Surowiecki’s keynote at CTC 2005, the core learning from which was that in order to make a group as successful as possible, it’s members needed to be “loosely networked.”  In other words, in touch with each other but drawing on sources of data and opinion and having diverse perspectives.  But it’s a useful theme: finding the balance between disconnected and overconnected.  Will collaborative technologies solve this for us?  I don’t think so. They should, if done right, reduce the friction in connection and shared information.  But in terms of that balance, it’s more that we’ll need to think carefully about how to use technologies that enable a high degree of connection in order put them truly at our service.

Perhaps I should like to recruit a couple of these researchers to speak at CTC.  Maybe a panel on Attention?  Your feedback is welcome. 

Other good quotes from this piece:

As the mother of a toddler, I have to say, this is quite accurate.