According to a report to be published in October by the New York-based research firm Basex, interruptions such as spam, other unnecessary e-mail and instant-messages take up 28% of the average knowledge worker's day.
On top of that is what Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira refers to as recovery time -- the time to get back to where you were before you were interrupted, which Spira says is 10 to 20 times the duration of the interruption. These interruptions account for up to 2.1 hours per worker per day. Multiply that by 56 million knowledge workers in the U.S., he calculates, and the cost is $650 billion per year.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, August 02, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 92 words Type of Material: Correction
E-mail: An article in Thursday's Section A about a backlash to e-mail said that the research firm Basex calculates that unnecessary e-mail and instant messages take up 28% of the average knowledge worker's day, and that this did not include "recovery time." The worker's recovery time -- the time it takes to resume work at the point it was interrupted -- is actually included in the 28%. In addition, the article stated that Basex's calculations will be reported in a study to be published in October. The study was published in 2005.
Susan Jamison, 48, a commercial litigation partner at Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass, a San Francisco law firm, is stressed to the breaking point. She sometimes receives hundreds of e-mails a day, she says, and most days she gets about 40 case-related notes, often with lengthy attachments.
"If it's a multi-party case, it may generate maybe 20 e-mails from other people," she says. "So as you're trying to focus on it, you're getting this ping-ping-ping as people are chattering about the e-mail."
Even her phone calls show up on-screen as e-mails when she's already on a call. How can she focus enough to write a brief?
E-mail backlash started in earnest last year with "no e-mail" Fridays at companies such as Intel, U.S. Cellular and Deloitte & Touche. But popular opinion has it that this turned out to be not much more than a Band-Aid.
More recently, the movement accelerated as a new organization, Information Overload Research Group, held a conference in New York. According to Vice President Deva Hazarika (who is also chief executive of ClearContext Corp., a software development corporation), the nonprofit group formed when a number of researchers, academics and software developers came together to discuss the challenges they were seeing in corporations.
"We all felt that information overload was something that was such a big problem that some companies were beginning to be aware of it but a lot of people didn't realize the magnitude of the problem," Hazarika says. "And we could increase awareness."
Ironically, a number of the group's members work for the companies that created software that caused the problem in the first place -- including four at Microsoft Research, creator of Outlook. E-mail, Hazarika says, was the conference's main focus because it is "very much the primary cause" of information overload.
