The blog

Dis­trac­tions and inter­rup­tions when you least need them seem to con­cern many, judg­ing by what par­tic­i­pants in my lec­tures and cours­es tes­ti­fy to. I have pre­vi­ous­ly high­light­ed research on how often we get inter­rupt­ed and how it affects our well-being and job sat­is­fac­tion. A Ger­man study nuances the pic­ture and shows that fac­tors oth­er than fre­quen­cy also deter­mine how drain­ing inter­rup­tions can be. Who asks if you have ​“a sec­ond”, what the inter­rup­tion results in, and in what form it comes also affects it to vary­ing degrees.

They cause stress and they don’t

In the study, it was found that the two most stress­ful forms were:

• Phone calls
• Emails

The two that, on the oth­er hand, were sig­nif­i­cant­ly less stress­ful were:

• Instant mes­sag­ing (chat)
• Face-to-face (F2F), i.e., a col­league stop­ping by or look­ing in on another

With­out pres­sure, it’s easier

The researchers hypoth­e­size that while a chat mes­sage is often infor­mal­ly for­mu­lat­ed, short, and does not require much effort, an email is often more for­mal and requires more effort to respond to. They also argue that a face-to-face con­ver­sa­tion pro­vides more inter­per­son­al inter­ac­tion than a phone call and is, there­fore, eas­i­er to per­ceive as valu­able and enjoy­able than an unwel­come interruption.

The choice is yours

Those who need to work focused at times and also enjoy being part of a team, there­fore, have some­thing to gain by con­scious­ly choos­ing their pre­ferred mode of com­mu­ni­ca­tion — not just opti­miz­ing the num­ber of inter­rup­tions they receive on a reg­u­lar day.

Do this

Think about how you con­tact, ask ques­tions of, or ask for help from your col­leagues and what response you usu­al­ly get. If your ques­tion seems to stress them out more often than you would like, try con­tact­ing them via chat or face-to-face instead (or ask them in which for­mat they them­selves pre­fer to receive questions).

Also, reflect on how you expe­ri­ence being inter­rupt­ed in dif­fer­ent for­mats. Con­sid­er if you would pre­fer one for­mat over anoth­er. Let your col­leagues know so they can choose the most advan­ta­geous way to con­tact you — for both them and you.

Choos­ing the right for­mat improves collaboration

If you con­scious­ly choose the for­mat for your and oth­ers’ ​“inter­rup­tions”, you will expe­ri­ence them as less stress­ful and tir­ing. Your col­lab­o­ra­tion with your col­leagues is like­ly to ben­e­fit, because what if you can answer ques­tions more often with the right cho­sen for­mat with­out affect­ing your tasks and well-being?

How do you do it?

How do you pre­fer to receive help ques­tions from your col­leagues? I would love to hear how you and oth­er read­ers expe­ri­ence it, so get in touch with me and tell me.

(Want to learn from more stud­ies? Also check out my post ​“Get inter­rupt­ed with­out mind­ing”.)