It’s well known that interruptions are lethal to our productivity, and that the kind of open plan offices common in the modern workplace are especially bad. Indeed, a famous study found that the average office worker is interrupted every three minutes and five seconds.

Whilst it’s tempting to think that such interruptions affect us all equally, a recent paper from Michigan State University suggests that the highly skilled are especially vulnerable.

The theory is that highly skilled people tend to get more done in a shorter space of time, and therefore each task is more densely packed into your day.  As such, whenever you are interrupted, you’re more likely to confuse one task with another when you try and refocus again after the interruption.

“Suppose a nurse is interrupted while preparing to give a dose of medication and then must remember whether he or she administered the dose,” the author says. “The more experienced nurse will remember less accurately than a less-practiced nurse, other things being equal, if the more experienced nurse performs the steps involved in administering medication more quickly.”

An interrupted day

Of course, it’s wishful thinking to expect any day to pass without interruption, and nurses should certainly not avoid giving medication for fear they’ll be disrupted in doing so, but being aware of the consequences of interruptions may help employees better manage the risk of things not going according to plan.

The findings emerged after an experiment whereby a few hundred participants performed a procedural task.  They were interrupted at random intervals and asked to perform a second, simple task, after which they were asked to recall the spot they were at in their previous task, and the correct next step.

As the session went on, people became more skilled, and therefore faster and more accurate at competing their core task.  When they were disrupted however, they subsequently became less accurate when the picked up again.

“The faster things happen, the worse we remember them,” the author concludes, adding that when workers are interrupted in the middle of critical procedures, as in emergency rooms or intensive care units, they may benefit from training and equipment design that helps them remember where they left off.