Jon Udell posted on something I saw, but mostly skipped over a couple of days ago - this "LifeHacker" story in the New York Times. Truth be told, since the Times put the TimesSelect thing in place, I've paid a lot less attention to them - I assumed this story was behind that, and moved along (yet another way that the Times has marginalized themselves, but I digress).

Anyway - the heart of the story is this snippet here:

Lots of people complain that office multitasking drives them nuts. But Mark is a scientist of "human-computer interactions" who studies how high-tech devices affect our behavior, so she was able to do more than complain: she set out to measure precisely how nuts we've all become. Beginning in 2004, she persuaded two West Coast high-tech firms to let her study their cubicle dwellers as they surfed the chaos of modern office life. One of her grad students, Victor Gonzalez, sat looking over the shoulder of various employees all day long, for a total of more than 1,000 hours. He noted how many times the employees were interrupted and how long each employee was able to work on any individual task.

When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, "far worse than I could ever have imagined." Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

That's not going to be a productive way to work, regardless of your profession. Jon is hoping for tool support to fix this, but I think that's fundamentally the wrong way to go - and online "status" pages that let other people know how busy you are aren't going to cut it either - people will just blow right past that, deciding that their stuff is more important - how many phone numbers do you run through when you get voice mail for someone on a given line? Do you just stop there? I din't think so :)

Now, I work out of a home office, so the problem of people walking up to me goes away. That leaves the phone (land line and mobile), email, news aggregator, and IM. All of these are easy to ignore, if I want to. The only real way to solve this problem is personal fortitude. You want to focus on a task? Fine - close the door, mount a "do not disturb" sign, and get to work. Technology isn't going to save you here.