Effusia Blog

When we started Liquid in 2001, instant messaging was still a relatively new phenomenon in most office environments. At the time there was much debate in the IT press as well as mainstream media as to whether the inevitable introduction of IM corporate life would help or hurt productivity. As we began to talk with potential customers about Effusia, many managers we spoke with were excited about the potential of the technology but several maintained serious reservations. Of this (generally hardcore) minority, one of the most common concerns was the perceived “interruptiveness” of IM; the feeling being that workers would not be able to complete “real” tasks without having to stop every five minutes to attend to some distracting and unwanted flashing window.

Six years on from these initial conversations, our experiences has been that the fear of IM interruption has decreased dramatically as managers have come around to the idea that the benefits gained from instant communication generally outweigh the downsides. Now, a new paper titled IM=Interruption Management? Instant Messaging and Disruption in the Workplace published in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication by R. Kelly Garrett from Ohio State and James N. Danziger from UC Irvine casts some academic light on our anecdotal experience of the last several years.

Garrett and Danziger surveyed 912 people who fit their criteria of “computer-using workers” to find out more about how they use (and perceive) IM in the workplace. Their main hypothesis was the somewhat counterintuitive idea that IM users would actually report feeling less interrupted. Turns out, it seems this is true. Though they found that IM users report having just as much work communication as non-IM users, they actually reported fewer interruptions. This is surprising until one starts to think that maybe the features of IM technologies actually empower people to manage interruptions more easily than with other technologies. The authors provide some insight into scenarios we’ve all experienced as IM users:

Nardi and her colleagues (2000) suggest that IM actually provides increased opportunities for negotiating the timing of interactions. From the sender’s point of view, IM provides a relatively unobtrusive way to test availability. The sender does not need to be as concerned about when to initiate communication, because he or she knows that the recipient can ignore or dismiss the IM notification easily or can provide an explicit indication of status quickly (e.g., “I’m busy right now. Can we talk in 15 minutes?”). Although an IM pop-up is disruptive, it is not as distracting as an inopportune telephone call or an unexpected office visit.

And also:

…because the presence awareness functionality provided by IM clients is generally quite limited, ignoring an incoming IM is often socially acceptable. Thus IM offers the recipient “plausible deniability” (Nardi et al., 2000, p. 84), because a non-response might simply mean that the person is away from the computer.

As a member of several IM-using organizations, I can say from experience that this “ping” approach is extremely common. Most of my conversations (both started by me and started by someone else) begin with a simple “there?” message. The great thing about the ping is it allows the receiving party to opt-out of the conversation gracefully. It’s perfectly ok to ignore the ping message for a little bit (but not too long) or respond with a “yes, but busy”. It’s a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that the sender’s desired conversation may not be the most important thing the recipient has going at the moment.

Basically, IM affords users the “power to ignore” in a way that other interactions do not. You can’t pretend not to hear an office-mate’s question as they stand in your doorway as that would be considered very rude. I would also venture to say that we’ve been conditioned our entire lives to pick up a ringing phone. Though it may briefly grab your attention, that blinking window in the corner of your screen can be dismissed in a way an uninvited co-worker cannot. Go forth and use the power to ignore, but do it wisely.

Tags: academic papers, business, im, interrupted, productivity

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 9:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.