Re: Tracking Interruptions -- Work Flow Question

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

I'm not sure there is any *good* way to track interruptions. As
pointed out by others, interruptions are not equal and the actual length
of the interruption is not necessarily a good reflection of the actual
impact to your productivity.

I've found two things which have helped me. One has helped to reduce the
interruptions and the other has provided some (minimal) help when I've
been questions on why a task has taken longer to complete than
estimated.

The first has been to use a type of pomodoro technique. Essentially, I
break my work up into blocks of time where I will not answer the phone,
email or anyone coming to my desk. I do run a timer which ticks down and
/allow/ interruptions in breaks between 'pomodoros'. The timer is really
useful as when someone comes to interrupt me, I can say, come back in x
minutes. It takes some training of your work colleagues, but they will
eventually respect your request (and being able to give them a definite
'come back in x minutes' helps).

The second thing I do is if an interruption cannot be avoided, I do
check out of my current task and only check back in once the
interruption has finished. While this doesn't tell you how much
productivity was actually lost by the interruption, you can at least do
some analysis of the clock times and show how often and for how long you
were interrupted - or at least working on that task was interrupted.

Tim

Michael Welle writes:

> Hello,
>
> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
>> Raymond Zeitler <zeitra@yahoo.com> writes:
>>
>>> Does anyone schedule and "org-clock" interruptions? I really need to
>>> quantify how much of a drain they are to my productivity.
>>>
>>> I thought I'd include a generic "** TODO Interruption" in my
>>> todo.org (or an inter.org file) and schedule it every day. Then I'd
>>> press "I" every time I get interrupted and perhaps tag it with a
>>> special term.
>>>
>>> Or I suppose I could use a capture template just for interruptions.
>>>
>>> What do you suggest?
>>
>> Seems to me the danger of interruptions is not how much time they take
>> up, but how much time it takes you to recover from them, and get back to
>> work. Much harder to clock!
> yepp. Maybe add a 'braininess' factor to every task. Tasks, that need a
> lot of thinking, let's say hacking, have a higher 'braininess' than, for
> instance, sharpening pencils. Depending on the 'braininess' of the
> interrupted task add another 15 or 30 minutes to the interruption
> account. 
>
> Regards
> hmw


-- 
Tim Cross