How interruption in office affects performance revealed

A new study has revealed that interruptions that an employee faces while working in the office, can negatively affect the quality of work.

Cyrus Foroughi, coauthor of "Do Interruptions Affect Quality of Work?", said that people don't realize how disruptive interruptions can be and there is value in determining whether interruptions affect the quality of the tasks that many people perform regularly, such as writing essays or reports.

Foroughi, with coauthors Nicole Werner, Erik Nelson, and Deborah Boehm-Davis, designed a study assessing how varying levels of interruption affected writing quality in an essay project. Two groups of participants were given time to outline and write an essay on an assigned topic. One group was interrupted multiple times with an unrelated task, and a control group had no interruptions. Independent graders scored the finished essays on a numbered scale.

It was found that significantly lower quality in essays completed by the participants who were interrupted during the outline and writing phases than in essays of those who were not interrupted. In addition, those participants who were interrupted during the writing phase wrote considerably fewer words.

Foroughi added that 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," said. "For example, turn off your cell phone and disable notifications such as e-mail while trying to complete an important task.

The study was published in Human Factors.