My son has been home on quarantine orders this week, so this seems like a great time to talk about work and interruptions.
My son is seven, which means, developmentally, he’s in prime question-asking time. If you have ever spent more than five minutes with a seven-year old, you are familiar with the volume and variety of inquiries I’m fielding on a daily basis.
In addition to this age-appropriate curiosity, however, my son is an outrageously, egregiously verbal processor. I’m sure someday he will have a rich and complex inner life, but right now he just has life. Inner, outer, public, private, these are meaningless distinctions. All thinking is done through conversation, and he would prefer it if those conversations were with me. All of them.
I’m glad he’s curious, of course, and since August, I’ve developed a coping strategy for this constant barrage of unexamined thoughts: I give up trying to work when he gets home.
You can understand that this past week, then, has been a bit more challenging.
As I write this, he is so close to me that his elbow is nearly blocking my access to the shift key. I am writing and he is counting gingerbread men on Seesaw, a task he ought to be able to perform autonomously, and yet I find myself verifying sums at fifteen to twenty second intervals.
It is 9:15 AM, and I have already been hit with following questions:
- Are there more rodents or humans on earth?
- How many days until Christmas?
- Mom?
- How much cereal could a person eat at once?
- Is a wooly mammoth as tall as our house?
- Mom?
- Which is bigger, a wooly mammoth or a mastodon?
- How much does an elephant weigh?
- How high can a person count?
- How many seconds will I be alive?
- Mom? What room are you in?
- How many days until my birthday?
- How many days until Lacey’s birthday?
- Mom?
- What comes after a quadrillion?
- What comes after a quintillion?
- What comes after a sextillion?
- What comes after a septillion?
- Why don’t you want to talk about millions anymore?
- Mom?
- Mom?
- Mom?
- Mom?
So, let’s discuss what this is doing to my brain and to yours.
There are a lot of estimates about how long it takes to refocus after an interruption, but it seems to be somewhere between fifteen and twenty-three minutes. That is a LONG time, particularly if you’re already stealing blocks of time during your children’s naps and/or “screen breaks,” which somehow keep turning into “screen days.”
Some studies have shown you lose as much as five hours of productivity a day due to interruptions, and that your mind functions as many as ten IQ points lower when it’s constantly interrupted.
As if feeling both unproductive and dumb isn’t stressful enough, the interruptions themselves raise your cortisol levels. Your prefrontal cortex has to expend energy over and over again to refocus after each obtrusion, and so your brain ramps up your stress hormones in order to keep the whole machine running.
Having elevated cortisol means that, no matter how interruption-tolerant you feel you are, your body is still keeping track of each break in your attention. In the absence of fights and/or flights, your brain will start shoving excess cortisol into every available muscle, cell, and tissue of your body, which over time leads to basically every health problem known to humans.
Including, drumroll please… Problems in memory, focus, and concentration! You know. The stuff you were short on anyway because you keep getting interrupted.
Oh, and, AND, interruptions prevent you from ever achieving the state of flow—long, sustained stretches of work that are so absorbing that you forget about your ninety-nine problems for a while. Flow is not only enjoyable in the moment, but also appears to raise people’s levels of baseline happiness and mental well-being.
In conclusion, getting interrupted makes you less productive, stupider, more stressed, and less able to access ways to reduce that stress.
Interruptions are bad for us, folks.
I tell you this not to encourage you to reduce interruptions during your work day—because either you’ve already tried, or you understand that removing a pet, child or spouse from your home is prohibitively challenging at this moment—but because I want you to take it easy on yourself.
If, like me, you are attempting to work and parent simultaneously, give yourself a break. Or if you’re trying to teach and contact trace 25 students simultaneously, give yourself a break. Or if your working environment is arranged in some other way that creates a relentless assault of emails, texts, grievances, or snack requests on your person, give yourself a break.
You’re not going to be as productive as you usually are. You may not even be as smart as you usually are. And probably, you’re not going to be as nice or centered or patient as you usually are.
That’s just the way it is. It may help to meditate or scream into the void once a day if you can, but your boss and co-habitants are going to have to accept some sub-optimal functioning for as long as this lasts.
So, pour some Moscato on the ground in memory of your competent, put-together, efficient self, and rest assured that you are not alone. Oh boy, are you not alone!
My son just asked me when COVID will be over, what a vaccine is, and when we will get it.
Indeed.
Keep hanging in there, friends.
