I was lecturing at Ben Gurion University about Information Overload, and one attendee challenged me with this question: has the cost of disconnecting from the continuous barrage of communications been quantified?
What he meant was this: the accepted wisdom in the Info Overload community is that it is advisable to take time out, “Quiet Time”, pre-assigned time slots in the workday when you don’t pull in incoming messages and calls and try to secure some isolation from interruptions. This allows one to get a stretch of concentrated focused thinking, which can do wonders for creativity, quality and effectiveness. But, as this guy pointed out, it is possible that in doing so you will miss out on important communications, or be perceived as unresponsive and piss off your customers, or slow down the work of your team. Has anyone measured this downside of “Quiet Time”?
The short answer is, not to my knowledge. There have been a number of research reports about the cost of not having focus time (and the numbers can be horrific), but I know of no research into the flip side of this.
A longer answer is, while we don’t have numbers here, I believe that the cost of disconnection can’t be prohibitive because this cost is something we can control by defining intelligently how we take the quiet stretches. To be sure, you can overdo it: I knew one guy (a Fellow at a large corporation) who only read his email twice a week; that would be a bad idea for almost anyone – too little connectivity unless you’re a trappist monk. But if you handle it right, you can retain sufficient interactivity and still have some time to think; taking 2-3 quiet hours at a time will not be too disruptive for most jobs. You need to strike a balance.
To avoid annoying your customers, you can have the best of both worlds – quiet and communication – by building into your methodology a means to reach you based on urgency. I wrote about this in a previous post. But if you’re part of a larger team, as many of us are, it helps if you design the Quiet Time methodology in coordination with your team mates; this has been tried in various places with good results, for instance in the developer team documented in Prof. Perlow’s book “Finding Time“. And if you do it right, you can make the “cost of missed interruptions” as small as you like, while the benefit of being able to think remains fixed. That’s good enough by me…
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the deep answer is outside the realm of the quantifiable and over there towards the realm of the mystic.
it involves the nature of consciousness, and the self.
in essence, don’t pay attention to the stuff. pay attention to the self. result? the right thing comes at the right time, invariably.
the courage required is in realizing that you are the instrument that measures the truth of this.