Santa Clara University

From PARC Forum Announcement (FREE):
Multi-tasking in the workplace: Tasks, information, and interaction contexts
 
Dr. Gloria Mark, University of California, Irvine
 
Thursday, March 25th, 2010  4:00pm – 5:00pm
 
Location:
George E. Pake Auditorium, PARC,
3333 Coyote Hill Rd, Palo Alto, California, USA

Information workers experience a high amount of disruptions in their daily work due to managing multiple tasks and interactions, and large amounts of information using various technologies. In this talk I will present empirical results from fieldwork observations and experiments over several years that detail the extent to which information workers multi-task, irrespective of their organizational role. I will discuss how multi-tasking impacts various aspects of collaboration and communication in the workplace.. Not only do information workers switch continually among multiple tasks but they also switch continually among interactions in varied workplace contexts, such as the work home and organization. We found that people compensate for interruptions by working faster, but this comes at a price of experiencing more stress. These results challenge the traditional way that most Information Technology (IT) is designed to organize information, i.e. in terms of distinct tasks. Instead, I will discuss how IT should support information organization in a way consistent with how most people were found to organize their work, which is in terms of much larger thematically connected units of work. I will present a prototype of a technology that can help support people in their multi-tasking and will also discuss how the results present opportunities for new social and technical solutions to support multi-tasking in the workplace.