Frazzing

The problem these days is—-

(phone ringing)

–is that we’re constantly interrupted by—-

"You’ve got mail!"

–by the very devices that were supposed to make our lives easier. I spoke yesterday with—excuse me, my pager just went off—with Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has spent the last several years studying—ugh, there goes the phone again—the cost of multitasking.

The new bit of slang for this is "frazzing"—short for frantic multitasking. Prof. Mark and a colleague, Victor Gonzalez, studied office workers for 13 months and found that, on average, they were being interrupted every ten-and-a-half minutes—whether by emails, calls, a question from the person in the next cubicle. Worse yet, having been called away, it took them another 23 minutes and 15 seconds, on average, to get back to what they were originally doing—by which time the only reasonable question could be, "Now, where was I?"

"There is what we call a ‘cognitive cost’ to these interruptions," she said. "You come back, and things have changed—there are new papers on your desk, new windows open on your computer." Time and attention become very valuable commodities.

We’re hoping to put a piece about this on "World News Tonight" tomorrow, if the fates allow—but I’ve already had seven emails while writing this post. Let’s see if I manage to—sorry, gotta go.

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Crackberries

In a similar vein, the specter looms of Blackberries going dark, now that the Supreme Court has refused to come to their manufacturer’s rescue. Eric Noe of our staff has written a very good piece on the prospects, which you can find by clicking on

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Technology/story?id=1540270

.

ABC has supplied me with a Blackberry, about which I am forcefully ambivalent. While we were shooting yesterday, it reported I had 77 unopened emails—never mind that I’d deleted them from my computer.

I worked on six different stories, in one way or another, yesterday. My own frazzing had me pretty frazzled by day’s end.

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Medical Note

All that seems pretty unimportant compared to what some of you wrote in response to my medical posts earlier in the week. Take a look at the comment from Dalene, who describes herself as a breast cancer survivor who keeps her own blog. (Click on

http://blogs.abcnews.com/scienceandsociety/2006/01/back_and_forth_.html#comments

.)  Deane, the day before, talks about watching out for soy products when you have a thyroid condition.

Could we reporters be of more help? I’m sure. We do try to distinguish between the quality of studies—we have a medical unit that spends a lot of time culling through journals, letting us know what’s coming and trying to warn us off the questionable papers. But it’s complicated. Almost as complicated as being a medical researcher. Or a patient.

–Ned