Word: task
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Spend a few hours with Hollywood producer Jennifer Klein, and you might want to pop a Valium. Or slip her one. From the moment she rises at 7 a.m. in the Sunset Boulevard home she shares with her husband, she's a fidgety, demanding, chattering whirling dervish of a task juggler. Right now Klein, 41, whose credits include Pearl Harbor and Armageddon, has 15 film and TV projects in development--all of them requiring constant nudging and nurture. Her strategy for managing that and several overflowing In boxes: never do just two things at once if you can possibly...
...average of just 11 minutes to a project before the ping of an e-mail, the ring of the phone or a knock on the cubicle pulled them in another direction. Once they were interrupted, it took, on average, a stunning 25 minutes to return to the original task--if they managed to do so at all that day. The workers in the study were juggling an average of 12 projects apiece--a situation one subject described as "constant, multitasking craziness." The five biggest causes of interruption in descending order, according to Mark: a colleague stopping by, the worker being...
...information-technology research firm in New York City, found that interruptions now consume an average of 2.1 hours a day, or 28% of the workday. The two hours of lost productivity included not only unimportant interruptions and distractions but also the recovery time associated with getting back on task, according to a Basex report titled "The Cost of Not Paying Attention," released in September. Estimating an average salary of $21 an hour for "knowledge workers"--those who perform tasks involving information--Basex calculated that workplace interruptions cost the U.S. economy $588 billion a year...
...workers at all levels said being interrupted by a friend with a nonbusiness-related question was "acceptable" (though the boss might take a different view). Several studies, including one by Mary Czerwinski, a senior researcher at Microsoft, show that interruptions at the beginning and the end of a task are the most detrimental to performance. An interruption when work has just got under way "blows away the goals you've established," says Czerwinski, while a ping or a knock at the end of the process "breaks the train of thought as people are reflecting and preparing for what they...
...current post on the circuit court. Colleagues say he was admired for collegiality. When two of his young aides had to finish a memo for the next day, he stayed with them past midnight and went to the law library to fact-check the memo they wrote, a task usually left for much more junior aides. But at his new job at Justice, what his co-workers remember above all is that he lived up to his reputation as focused more on legal reasoning than on political doctrine. "The others were much more open about being part of a revolution...