Don't Interupt Busy People.

[xoxoxoBruce]

How long to get back in the groove after an interruption?
I think it depends on the type of interruption, a quick question your can answer off the top of your head.
Or one that gets you thinking about a subject which remains unresolved.
Maybe something that irritates you enough to mumble curses as they walk away.

Why study interruption?

I became interested in it from my own personal experience. I moved here from Europe back in 2000. I was stunned by the amount of multitasking that I was doing here in the U.S. and I was wondering if other people were experiencing it as well. Anecdotally, people were reporting they were crushed by all of these different projects. People's lives as information workers involve different kinds of technologies, and they create even more of a force for interruption and different places where we can focus our attention.

How long does it take people to get back on task?

We found about 82 percent of all interrupted work is resumed on the same day. But here's the bad news — it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task.

link

[Lamplighter]

By coincidence...

Today I read an article about "Good cop / Bad cop" interrogations,
and why they seem to work (in real life) as opposed to the movies.

The hypothesis was that it had to do with "interruptions" in critical thinking.
That is, first, the Bad Cop created a stressful (fearful) situation.
Then the Good Cop's role was to relieve that stress (fear).

And that this sudden relieve of stress interfered with the person's critical reasoning,
...and so confessions or other self-harming statements would pass the person's own
filters and defense mechanisms.

They gave examples of (crowd) experiments with these 3 elements.

I'll see if I can find the link...

ETA: Here it is: Here's Why the "Good Cop, Bad Cop" Routine Actually Works

[xoxoxoBruce]

The last line from the link, which gather is the opinion of the articles author, not the scientists who ran the experiments...

All we can say in the end is that the "good cop, bad cop" routine can work — but it's not particularly reliable. Sometimes it just makes you really slow at math.

Guess we'll have to stick to waterboarding.