We define distraction as consisting of two different parts, meaningful and meaningless distraction. The way we define it is through their relation to the completion of the task at hand. This can better be described as a current activity. This is because a task cannot be seen simply as a moment in time but more as a process from beginning to end. A distraction can be described as meaningful when the significance of the distraction is greater than the significance of the current activity. When this is not the case, and the significance of the current activity is greater than the significance of the distraction, we define this as meaningless distraction. In earlier work is outlined which distractions and (self)interruptions have negative effects on ongoing work tasks and what these negative effects are. Among others these effects are errors, work delay, stress and context-switching costs.
These meaningless distractions decrease productivity of the current activity because the energy it takes to regain the loss of concentration is greater than the result of the distraction. Note, this does not mean the productivity in general decreases, the productivity can be unchanged due to the fact that the meaningful distraction might influence the productivity of the current activity but this loss can be made up for when encountering in the meaningful distraction. If the significance of the current activity is equal to the significance of the distraction, we are in a balanced state. This has no or close to no influence on the general productivity or the productivity for the specific activity.
From the field research we conducted we found the two types of distraction as depicted above. What we noticed is that some distractions are unavoidable distractions, for instance a question of a team-member or colleague who needs an answer or even help that stretches further than the answering of a question. These assumptions are also based on scientific research on this subject. From one of the sources we examined [2] we found also that there are different sorts of stimuli that result in distraction. Self-interruptions as an example also occur when deliberately and consciously a user disrupts him- or herself by for example sending an email in between tasks or during a task or also physically moving to get a cup of coffee.
What we found from all this is that not all distractions are caused by external stimuli and not all distractions are per se negative, meaning they negatively influence the continuation of a task or hold back productivity.
- Jin, J., & Dabbish, L. A. (2009, April). Self-Interruption on the Computer: a Typology of Discretionary Task Interleaving. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1799-1808). ACM.
- Mark, G., Iqbal, S., Czerwinski, M., & Johns, P. (2015, February). Focused, Aroused, but so Distractible: Temporal Perspectives on Multitasking and Communications. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 903-916). ACM.