What makes Real-World Interruptions Disruptive? Evidence from an Office Setting

Abstract

With the constant barrage of cell phone calls, emails, instant messages, calendar reminders, and more, interruptions have become a common and consistent occurrence in our daily lives. The majority of the literature on interruptions to date has been based on controlled laboratory experiments and it is not yet completely clear how these results will translate into naturalistic settings and/or if there are certain features of interruptions and resumption that are not observable in the controlled setting. The current study is an exploratory study of how interruptions manifest in the naturalistic environment. We found that when working on computer-based tasks in real-world environments, external interruptions are more disruptive than internal interruptions. However, no reliable difference was shown in resumption time when resuming from multiple interruptions as opposed to single interruptions, and when resuming a different task as opposed to resuming the same task that was interrupted.