At Jive there are quite a few “Battlestar Galactica” fans, but I had not watched the show before this weekend. When my wife received the season one DVD set over the holidays, it was a chance to find out what all the buzz was about. The show is awesome so far, but one scene in particular caught my attention. During the first episode the commander of the ship rehearses a speech as he wanders the corridors. He keeps repeating the first couple of sentences of his monologue, but is consistently interrupted before getting any further. As he settles into giving his speech it becomes clear that all of those interruptions distracted him from his plans and he ends up giving a completely different speech. In our own daily work lives, interruptions can be very costly. CNET recently reported on research by Basex that found that interruptions could be costing U.S. businesses up to $588 billion per year.
What does this have to do with real-time collaboration? Instantaneous human interaction, whether in person or through a medium such as IM, has the potential for interruptions which lower productivity. At the same time, some interruptions are critical to collaboration and creativity. Coming up with tactics for managing these interruptions in a way that balances the good and and bad aspects can greatly improve all of our effectiveness. Matt provided some tips last year, including some of the ideas below.
One way to manage interruptions is through the active management of one’s presence. At Jive, if you set your presence to “Do Not Disturb”, most people will avoid messaging you unless it is critical. When you really need focused time, “Do Not Disturb” can be invaluable. However, there are still in-person interruptions that can occur since your presence cannot be seen as people walk up to your desk. We recognized this problem internally and have added USB LED signal lights to some workstations (the lights are expensive). A Sparkplug then changes the color of the light based on the user’s presence. For example, when the presence is set to “Do Not Disturb” the light automatically changes to red as a signal to others. This system works well for people who actively manage their presence, but not for those of us who routinely forget to change our presence.
Automatic presence information synchronization is a great way to help solve the pain of manually changing presence. Wildfire and Spark can be integrated with Asterisk so that when someone is on the phone, their presence is automatically updated to “On the phone” — this works great with the presence lights. A future source of presence information will be Outlook calendars. Automatically changing presence to “In a meeting” will help others see whether you’re available and save them time tracking you down. The (somewhat blurry) picture at right shows two presence lights in action — the one in the foreground is green, while the one in the distance is red. Next week I’ll package up the Spark plugin that powers the lights and release it in the forums for anyone that’s interested.
Achieving greater productivity through the reduction of interruptions is beneficial for all of us. We can experience less frustration and be more effective without giving anything up. All it takes is more consistent use of presence to indicate availability — that requires both accurate (and automatic) presence information as well as a culture of respect for presence status so that “Do Not Disturb” has teeth. Let’s work together to shave a few billion dollars off of the waste that unnecessary interruptions generate.
18 Responses to “$588 billion? Are you serious?”
- 1 Pingback on Jan 12th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
- 2 Pingback on Jan 20th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
- 3 Pingback on Apr 18th, 2007 at 2:20 am
I love the USB lights! That’s such a great idea. If only they weren’t so expensive. I have very interested in the Outlook calendar sparkplug. That would be great as well.
Glad you like the lights.
Out of curiosity, what would you like to see from the Outlook calendar sparkplug?
The lights on the cubes are priceless.
Now, if Jive could come up with some sort of “mobile” version I could wear; informing passers-by of one’s mood, workload and bladder control level: they could make billions.
Andrew - LOL, it takes mood lighting to a whole new level!
Hello!
http://www.mauriciomelo.com/contents/interact05.htm
This is the next level after your starter package with a simple green/red light!
Enjoy!
Starry99
Starry99, thanks for the link, that is a very nice looking device.
Outlook Sparkplug. To be honest I’m not sure. At first it sounded like a great idea for those two programs to talk to one another. We use calendaring here with outlook and an exchange server. It works great for scheduling when you can view each others calendars and determine if they are busy or not. But in the case of current status it is less useful.
At least Spark-to-Outlook. I could see though somehow if Outlook synchronized its calendar status to spark. So once the time for “In A Meeting” comes my spark status automagically changes to reflect it. This actually would be pretty nice.
Thanks Nathan, your Spark-to-Outlook idea is definitely one of the areas we’re focused on. There are privacy issues that need to be addressed through configuration options, but automatic presence updates based on calendar data will be very nice.
Re: respect the DND
That’s one way to reduce interuptions. Another is just plain discipline. When I’m DND, I don’t really mean don’t message me. I just mean, don’t expect a reply until I’m free.
Respectfully, good point about not expecting a reply until someone is free. I tend to send messages to people who are away without the expectation of immediate response (obviously), but if they are DND then I don’t send a message because the IM client will likely interrupt their train of thought.
One thing on the recipient’s side which we find helps with Psi is that even if you have configured incoming IMs to pop up on receipt, if you are in DND status, they won’t do that. Instead we queue the messages and you only see a subtle animation in the tray icon to know that someone is trying to reach you. I haven’t run Spark in a while so I don’t know if that would make sense for you to do.
halr9000, thanks for the note about Psi. That type of behavior is something we’re considering for Spark since it can help with interruption management.
Following on the Outlook support ideas I’d be interested in a plugin that worked with my published iCalendar Free/Busy data and set me busy or away when I was not available.
Daniel, thanks for the input!
The presence light Sparkplug is now available in the forums. Check it out if you have a chance. http://www.igniterealtime.org/forum/thread.jspa?threadID=24148