It makes a theoretical contribution by showing how people adapt to small changes in time costs by reducing the number and duration of interruptions, and postponing them until later in a task. Taken together, this thesis demonstrates that people manage interruptions based on expected time costs, and that giving people feedback on the time they spend on interruptions can help them manage their interruptions better. These studies demonstrate that making people aware of the time costs of digital interruptions makes people reflect on what they were doing during an interruption, reduces the duration of interruptions, and makes people faster and more accurate in completing data entry tasks. The third part of the thesis reports an online experiment and a field study that evaluate a design intervention showing people the duration of their interruptions. They reduce the number of these interruptions and postpone them until later in the task, and address interruptions with low time costs first. Results show that if people are able to learn the expected time costs of digital interruptions, they avoid interruptions with a high time cost. The second part of the thesis reports three controlled experiments to test the hypothesis that people manage interruptions by avoiding time costs. They demonstrate that physical interruptions are postponed until a convenient moment in the task if they are expected to take time, but digital interruptions are addressed immediately as these are presumed to be quick to deal with. The first part of the thesis reports two qualitative studies looking at understanding data entry in an office setting. This thesis investigates how interruption management tools can better support people in managing these types of work-required interruptions in the context of data entry work. Though these interruptions are required to progress with work, switching away from a task can be disruptive: it slows people down, increases errors and it is challenging to remain focused on work. We conclude that more work is needed to investigate the self-improvement hypothesis and provide a set of recommendations for future work.Ĭomputer-based work often involves looking up information from different sources. First results are promising-many of the selected articles report users gaining actionable insights-but we do note a number of methodological issues that make these results difficult to interpret. From a corpus of 6,568, only 24 studies met the selection criteria of being a peer-reviewed empirical study reporting on actionable, data-driven insights from PI data, using a “clean” PI system with no other intervention techniques (e.g., additional coaching) on a nonclinical population. Here, we review relevant theory as well as empirical evidence for this self-improvement hypothesis. ![]() The purpose commonly envisioned for these systems is that they provide users with actionable, data-driven self-insight to help them change their behavioral patterns for the better. Personal informatics (PI) systems allow users to collect and review personally relevant information. We conclude that feedback on the length of interruptions can assist users in focusing on their primary task and thus improve productivity. Participants who used our tool made shorter interruptions, completed the spreadsheet task faster and made fewer data entry errors. To confirm whether participants’ perceptions of the benefit of the tool could be measured, we conducted an online experiment, where participants had to retrieve information from an email sent to their personal email addresses and enter it into a spreadsheet. They reported that they used this insight to avoid task-irrelevant activities. A field study deployment of TimeToFocus in an office workplace found that feedback on the duration of interruptions made participants reflect on what they were doing during interruptions. To increase awareness of time spent on digital interruptions, we developed TimeToFocus, a notification tool showing people the duration of their interruptions while working on a task. ![]() ![]() In contrast, observations revealed that digital interruptions were addressed immediately participants reported these were presumed to be quick to deal with. Participants were observed to postpone physical interruptions until a convenient moment in the task if they were expected to take time. We conducted a contextual inquiry on self-interruption behaviour in an office workplace. In this article, we investigate whether giving people feedback on how long they are away from their task influences their self-interruption behaviour. Many computer tasks involve looking up information from different sources, and these self-interruptions can be disruptive.
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