The core problem

1. In 2005, Basex, an analyst firm, estimated that interruptions consume 28% of a knowledge worker's day. Basex CEO Jonathan Spira lamented that whether you're at home, in your office, or working from a client site, "the likelihood of being able to complete a task without interruption is nil." He recommended "finding a place without landline phones, mobile phone reception, Wi-Fi and possibly even people."

2. According to UC Irvine professor Gloria Marks, Spira was mistaken. The good news from her 2005 paper (PDF) was, the likelihood of a task being completed without interruption is actually 42.9%! On the downside, the type of interruptions considered in Basex's report (incoming phone calls, emails, etc) represents only 52% total interruptions observed in her study. Workers are almost equally likely (48%) to self-interrupt by switching between tasks.

3. If we roughly assume that internal and external interruptions are equally disruptive, a worker is left with just 46.2% of his day for productive work.

(Marks' study showed that on average, workers take 22 minutes to get back to the task at hand after being interrupted by someone else, versus 29 minutes after switching tasks on their own. In addition, only 47.6% of self-interrupted tasks are resumed on the same day, versus 53.3% after external interruptions. So while workers experience slightly fewer incidences of self-interruption, they are more damaging on a per unit basis than external interruptions.)

4. So multiple monitors might be a must-have for anyone who wants to get anything done. Lifehacker reported a couple of years ago that having two monitors increases the rate of task completion by 20%-30%. Maybe the additional display space reduces attention-shifting frequency? I definitely tend to leave half-read/half-written documents all over different windows and browser tabs. If I could see everything all at once, would I be more likely to finish what I started? Probably.

5. So I was telling Dmitri that maybe the real message behind this chart isn't his software's ability to do more. Instead, it prevents self-interruption by corralling the user's attention. Maybe that's why customers of Salesforce and Zoho, among others, have asked for Relenta-like email/CRM consolidation under the same interface? And maybe it wasn't just marketing-speak when Dmitri insisted that not only does he eat his own dog food, he wouldn't have any free time ever without Relenta.

6. I feel like I understand marketing so much better after reading It's Not Luck. Everyone talks about focusing on benefits vs features, but the book goes farther in pointing out that benefits only matter if they address customers' "core problems". Nobody wants CRM software as much they want more free time, so CRM apps are valuable only to the extent that they help users get more done (and hopefully close more deals) in less time. It sounds obvious, but I don't think I've ever thought of it that way before.

Comments

[john]

I read this post about 5 minutes into starting a work-related task. However, CRM is work-related so it could be a worse distraction I suppose.

Glad to see you are posting more of your insights.