It's Fine to Obsess over March Madness at Work

but it's March madness. I don't care about the sports either, but I do hear occasional shouting from various corners of the newsroom, and I know it is about the college sports. The team won the match, Yeah, they got the ball in the thing. But we are in the minority. Lots of people care about March madness, and March madness kind

of consumes the day for a lot of people. Yeah, it seems like this particularly office focused thing because the games happened during the day, and also people fell out their brackets and often they're involved in these work brackets that you have like a reason to talk to your colleagues, right, So yeah, it's just like all consuming office distraction. And obviously, like we don't care about March madness, but this happens periodically throughout the year. Like my version of this is

the Olympics. I love watching the Olympics, and I just like I shamelessly watched during the day, so like every four years you will drop everything to the Francesca. Oh, you're a winter Olympics person too, Okay, we can talk about that offline. But yeah, And there's always these articles every March. I know this because this is my beat, and it's always like, oh, the productivity cost of get pitched the product story about like how March madness is

costing offices billions of dollars each year. I've read estimates of anywhere from one point three to four billion. That just sounds really high. Yeah, I think for that to be true, you would have to assume that the rest of the time, when there isn't March Madness going on, people are using all of that time completely productive, which

of course they're not. Right. That's the thing is, even if it is not the Olympics or March Madness, there are going to be things disrupting your day and you have to kind of have strategies to work around them, right, Yeah, I have this theory of distractions. So when I'm writing a story and I'm like so at risk of being distracted by Twitter or at or anything else, I listened to like pretty intense hip hop music, okay, because the lyrics and the beat distract me from my other distractions.

Like I'm so into the music that I can be into my writing and not think about going on Twitter. Like I have such a problem with distractions that I need other distractions. This is intense, Like you told me about this, and I'm having trouble getting my head around it because I'm like most people where I need music that's the equivalent of like noise. If I'm working, it has to be ambient kind of music that's a little bit boring and has no lyrics because it has to

just be one step higher than silence. But silence is too distracting because I like empty. Yeah, it's kind of similar where it's like you want to fill up your mind with something so that it doesn't wander to something else. But in my mind is just like really needs help so you don't end up writing like rap lyrics into your stories. Though by accident, I don't know, I'm not even listening to the words, I think you have a

unique mind. Oh, my goodness, so kind, thank you. Maybe even march madness in some ways can be a positive distraction. Or colleague Polly Muslins wrote a story that said, there is a positive element to march madness. It can increase camaraderie and office happiness because people have something to share. And like you said, you know you're being distracted by something anyway, maybe it's better to be distracted by something

that does have these elements of team building. So we have this theory between us that not all distractions are created equal. But let's talk to somebody who's actually an expert on distractions, interruptions and everything. Like Gloria Mark is an expert on human computer interaction. She is a professor at the University of California IRV and prolific researcher on distractions, interruptions, and multitasking. Thanks for talking to us, by Gloria, My pleasure.

So why don't we start by just talking a little bit about this state of distraction at work today? Like what is distracting people? Well, I would say, you know, since the mid two thousand's people were mostly distracted by social media. I would say more recently, it's shifted and it's now become people being distracted by news. People checking the news because the news is updated so frequently, there's so many news sites. People participate in generating news, commenting,

sharing news. So I think this has shifted from uh, you know, more general social media to more particular news following. Are those different types of interrupts or distractions or are they in the same category. I would say that interrupting your work to look at news is a very similar kind of distraction to social media. And let me explain why.

So we did a recent study. This was in the in a workplace, and we contrasted people taking breaks, in other words, interrupting themselves either with face to face intractions or going to social media. One of the things we were interested in was how distractions affect workplace mood, and we found that right after people have a face to face interaction, they were happier than right after they had

a Facebook interaction. But when we look at the cumulative amount of time spent on distractions, like over the whole day, people are actually happier the more time they spent on Facebook. And this was very curious and here's why. Because the more engaged people were in their work that day, the

more time they spent on Facebook. And when you go onto social media, not just Facebook, but any kind of social media or even a news site, you are in control of your time, whereas if you're in a face to face interaction, you're a prisoner of that interaction in the sense that we have social interaction rituals that we go through. Right, you can't break away quickly from a face to face interaction. It's rude, right, it sends the

wrong social signals. But on social media, you can control when you take that distraction, how long you spent, what you do on that site. You know, whether you share something or like something, or changed to a different site. And the same with news sites. So I think that the main difference is that these kinds of distractions social media news sites offer people a kind of control of their time. So I'm sort of surprised to learn that people who spent a lot of time on Facebook during

the day are are happier. But it sounds like for a certain type of employee that that you can actually be a positive sort of distraction. What are the negative effects of interruptions or distractions at work? So one of the main effects is that it's related to stress. So usually I do UH studies in the workplace, but to investigate interruptions, I did a laboratory study and we interrupted people.

We had them do a workplace tasks and we simulated workplace and we found that the more that people were interrupted, the more stressed that they were. What was interesting, though, was that the interruptions did not affect the quality or the accuracy of their task. So what happened was that people sped up. They sped up the rate at which they worked because they knew they were getting interrupted. And

I think this is what happens in the workplace. So if you're in an environment and you anticipate being interrupted, you're going to work a lot more efficiently. You know, you know you've got to leave a certain time at the end of the day most most people do. Some people work late, and so you want to optimize what you can do during that time. And so you know, you you'll attend to distractions interruptions, but the time you spend on task, you'll try to be a lot more efficient.

But the end result is that it increases stress. So it sounds like there are good things and bad things I think people will be surprised to hear that there are benefits to distractions. Are there certain distractions that we should be trying to seek out more than others? I think dist actions that relate to your context at hand

are are very beneficial. So, you know, if I'm working on a very complex project and a colleague comes in interrupts me with a question exactly about that project, then it's very beneficial because it might help me to think very differently about that project. It might give me a new inside, It might lead me to think of something I had forgotten, you know, just a new perspective on it.

If we're interrupted by things that are completely a different context, we have to do what's called a context shift, and this requires more cognitive resources to make that shift right, because we have to orient to a completely new context. And this creates stress. And when you do this over the course of a day, day in and day out, the stress cumulates, right because you're all you're constantly making

these shifts. We know also from our research that people have very short attention durations when they work on the computer. The media attention duration on any computer screen is forty seconds, and what that means is that people are continually shifting attention. Sometimes they're shifting to the same task, sometimes they're completely changing to other tasks. So again, if you're making context shifts,

this plays a role in increasing stress. So if everyone is constantly switching between one thing and another, should we be trying to do less of that or should we just be trying to keep the switches in the same context. I think ideally it's best to try to shift as little as possible. Of course, some things don't require much time to deal with, UH, such as email. But but this is a whole other kind of distraction that that creates stress as well. What kind of distraction is that?

So email is definitely associated with stress. We we've done studies just focusing on the effects of email. In one study that we did, we had people we we did a baseline measure that this was using sensors to measure their stress. UH. They worked as they did ordinarily, and then we had them spend a work week without email, so everything else was the same, and if they needed to contact someone, they could pick up the phone, they could walk out of the office, and we found that

stress went down significantly. People were significantly more relaxed and we also found that their focus of attention on any computer screw mean, on any task was significantly longer. And it turns out that people were quite happy to not have email for that week. And at the end of the week, we showed them their emails that they missed for that week, and it turns out that information ages very very quickly, and if you don't attend to an

email very quickly, very often the problem gets solved. Another thing I will say about email distractions, uh that makes it a little bit different, is that email requires focused attention. In other words, it requires work because people have to very often carefully craft emails, especially if it's two people who are colleagues or people who are supervisors or customers clients, So you have to be very careful about the language

you use. And it requires at ten and consequently stress, And we find that when we're measuring stress with sensors were logging the time that that they spend on email, we find a very very interesting relationship. When people go on email, stress goes up in real time. They go off email, the stress goes down in real time. And we control for every possible thing we can think of. We control for work, role, and gender and experience and all these things that could possibly affect the relationship of

stress and email, and it's a very robust result. We just did a whole episode on email, and I think our guest would would definitely agree with you if you have. And I'm wondering if you've replicated that with the new chat apps that are now out there, Like, yeah, we haven't, but that is something that I am planning to do. Yes, So right now, a lot of people at work are

paying a lot of attention to college basketball. Um it's that time of year when people spend time betting on basketball and watching games, and you often hear employers complain about how much time it takes up and how much distraction it causes. I'm wondering, is that the kind of distraction that is actually possibly good for you because it makes people happy and it causes camaraderie. I would say

it could be good. I would also imagine that this kind of distraction is going to be really engaging for people in the sense that it's going to be hard to pull away. So I mentioned earlier that when people go on to social media, we found that they were in control of their time. I'm just wondering for these kinds of distractions that people are very emotionally involved in, like sports, it might be very hard to pull away, and it might be hard to go back and do

work that's probably more Monday. So you should just give into it. I think the best strategy is you just a lot a certain amount of time to you know, go on go online, you know, look at the sports coverage, get it out of your system, and then you cut it off and then you go back to work. And it really does involve discipline, but you've got to cut it off because otherwise, uh, it'll be very hard to to control. I'm wondering do certain people deal with distractions

better than others. I know there are people around me who seem like they can both be on Twitter all day and write a million articles. It seems like they're really good at being distracted and getting stuff done. Have you found any differences between people and your research. Yeah. So, first of all, most people prefer what's called mono chronic work, and that means working one task through the completion before

you start something else. I I am that way, but you know, we live in an environment that requires us to be what's called poly chronic, which is working on different tasks, switching back and forth depending on the priorities, deadlines, and so on. Now, there are some people that actually prefer polychronic work, so they thrive in an environment where they can work on several things at the same time.

These are the multi taskers we always hear about, right, These are the multitaskers extraordinaire who can switch back and forth. You can't, you can't physically work on two things at the same time. People's attentional resources don't allow that. But people can switch their attentional resources back and forth. There's there is another thing, though, You asked about differences in people, and we did find that people well who spend very

short attention durations on the computer. In other words, these are people that switch really frequently. We looked at personality differences, and indeed we found that these people score very high on a neuroticism personality trait. They also score high and what's called an impulsivity trait, giving way to impulsive behavior, and they're all some more susceptible to stress. So there there are yes individual differences among people who who do

switching behavior. I'm wondering if those people have that personality type, or they've developed those traits from working in the type of job where they have to switch between screens over and over again. You basically just diagnosed both of us were out. Uh. Well, So neuroticism is believed to be invariant, So it's a it's a personality trait that is not believed to change very much. The same with impulsivity, So people are more or less impulsive. However, people being susceptible

to stress, this can change. This, This can vary among people, among individuals. One day I may be more susceptible than another day. I mean, it depends not just on what's going on in workplace, but what's going on in my personal life. So so yeah, it's it's really a mix of inherent traits and things that can vary. So I just want to wrap up by asking you whether your research has given you any insight into how you handle distractions. If anything, it's just made me more aware of how

distractable I am. I am as much a victim to distractions as anyone that I study. I have tried different things. I've tried, uh, catching my my email. Uh, in other words, looking at just certain times of the day at email. Uh, the same with social media, the same with news sites. Uh. I have not succeeded very well, I have to admit, but but I do find that if I make a list at the beginning of the day of what I want to accomplish that day, I I generally do quite well.

So lists can help, and surprisingly they can also help keep me on track from from always going to social media or news or email. Well, your research is helping the rest of us out here in the world fight distraction. So we appreciate all the good work you're doing. Thank you so much for talking to us. It was my pleasure. There seems to be more different kinds of distractions than I ever even realized. Like there's a self interruption, and

then there's being interrupted by somebody else. Like there's so many different I'm overwhelmed and distracted by how distracting all the different types of distractions are. It does seem to confirm my theory a little bit. How there's like different types of distractions and my music distraction is a different kind of distraction than the Twitter distraction. Yeah, and that they are good ones and bad ones, And it's interesting. All we hear about is how to get rid of

distractions like that. There are people who have their whole lives too, like our guest last week, Dan r Ellie, who made an app so he doesn't check his email, And when I heard about his way of life, I was like, Wow, I should just do that, and I'm going to be so much more productive and happier, and

I really have like envy. Yeah. But then Gloria Mark's research shows that actually people seem to adjust to the distractions that they have, so that was kind of reassuring to me, Like, you become more efficient as a result of having all these distractions, so it's not necessarily a productivity cost so much as a stress induce her like, her research found that people are just super stressed out by all these distractions, and I actually related to that

now that I think about it, I think, having just grown up working with Internet distractions, it's like I can't do my work without a certain level of distractions, Like I've become like I've worked them into my workflow so much. But maybe trying to create a post distraction world for yourself, which a lot of people do. They have you know, Chrome extensions installed to block certain apps, you're smiling because you do this, and you recommended this to me, and

I wasn't successful at keeping the extension installed. But now you can justify this behavior to yourself because maybe sometimes distractions happen. And yeah, and if you try to live in a sensory deprivation tank and like have a world with no distractions in it, I think you're just creating this really fragile bubble that as soon as it gets shattered, like your your workflows destroyed because you haven't taught yourself the coping skills that you need to with distraction. So basically,

go ahead and watch your march badness. Yeah, take your break, enjoy it, and know that if you were doing that, you would just be doing something else distracting. And let's distract ourselves with some half big takes half fake takes, a little bit of housekeeping before we get to our half big takes. You can leave a message with your half big take by calling two and two six zero

one six six. This week, a listener called in with a story and reaction to our episode about crying at work from a couple of weeks ago, and her own half big take. Hey, I just heard your podcast about how it was okay to cry at work, and it made me think of a funny, tragic story that happened to me. I had a phase in my life where work would make me cry almost every day, like I would spend almost an hour a day in the bathroom stall.

And there was one night where I ended up having a panic attack and it wentn't hit in a cube for someone that hadn't been there. Because I work second shifts, of the entire building, essentially upstairs or downstairs is cleaned out. So I ended up going and crying in a cube somewhere and someone walked up and found me, and it

was like the most awkward conversation ever. I'm sitting there with tears running down my face, hyper ventilating, just like I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, And so she goes, oh, well, you did a great job because you scared the crap out of me. So yeah, that's my story about crying. In case anyone ever had like a major crying incident, I can totally relate. And also, my half baked take is that I work in an office where for a shift and second shift have to share cubicles and desks.

So my half bake take is that no matter what time your shift starts, you shouldn't have to worry about your someone sitting in your seat when you come into work. And yeah, that's it. Thank you by so much in that message that I even came up with my own half big take off of her crying story, which is that if you work in a really toxic environment, you should probably have your crying spot picked out. Um, and

that's for her half big take. Yeah, if you have to share a desk already, you should be extra courteous of your co workers if you're in a desk sharing situation, because desk sharing situations kind of suck. Yeah, there's they're kind of hip now, Yeah, there's hot desking, hoteling, hot desking. Yeah, hot desking. It's like when you have their own desk. So yeah, tidy up your desk and leave your desk on time so that the next shift that seems like

a reason start to their shift. Becca, what is your not fully fleshed out thought that you'd like to share with the world. So there's some sad news that we need to share that Sam Grobart, who was taking over while you were on maternity leave, has moved on to a new job, but he inspired me in so many ways, but also for this half big take and that if you are starting a new job you should be a

little bit scared. I'm with that, Okay, go on, And I think it's like, you know, if you're leaving a job that you I think if you're leaving a job you like, which I think Sam liked it here, it's different if you're like leaving a toxic environment and you're just like trying to get out. But if you're like choosing to move on, I think like there should be a little bit of fear because or else maybe it wasn't the right decision. You shouldn't move on to something

more comfortable. Fear means you're taking a risk. Yeah, and risks are good. And if you're happy and comfortable and you know it's just going to be a piece of cake job, then yeah, why are you even doing it? I guess that's like the weird, ambitious persons warped version of working. I will tell you that before I started my job here, I took a week off between leaving

my old job and starting here. I thought I was going to have like a staycation and get lots of stuff downe around the house, and that whole week was ruined because I was just racked with anxiety about starting this new job. And look at you now, so obviously it's a great job, because I was so nervous about exactly why I started. Anyway, what's your happy to take? My half? Big take is a troubling phenomenon that seems to be becoming more and more common in my office life.

I have virtual friendships with people that I work with that are not matched by my I r L relationship with them. So like, either on chat or on Twitter, I communicate with these people and we like yuck it up, like there's lots of jokes, we say witticisms to each other, and then we like pass each other in the office and barely even acknowledge each other. I just it's like there are some people that I'm not even sure they would know who I am if they saw me, but

on Twitter like we're best. But I have a lot of thoughts about this. One is that some people are just really awkward in person and they do better online. But also that I do believe that chat friendships are real friendships. That's what I was going to ask, because I get pleasure out of them. I feel like I know these people better. And then it's like I walk up to them and I'm like, yeah, how you try? Do you try to be friends? Because I think you should try? How far do I have to go to try?

I don't know enough to tar it's out loud, mhm. It seems like a lot of work. I think I'll just stick to the Twitter. This isn't so much a half big take as like a little therapy sash. Yeah. I just I get real pleasure out of the online repartee, and then I expected to translate into real life and then I feel like I'm missing something when it doesn't so me. My half big take on your half big take is it's okay to just have online friendships. Okay,

thank you for that permission. This has been half big takes, half fake takes. Thank you for listening to game Plan. I'm on Twitter at Francesca today and I'm at RZ Greenfield and you can tweet your half bag takes two at game Plan, or you can call into our super awesome hotline at two and two six seven zero one six six. If you like our show, please go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, rate review, subscribe, leaving your reviews really really helps. And while you're there,

check out our fellow Bloomberg podcast, Decrypted. It's all about technology stuff. This show was produced by Liz Smith and Magnus Hendrickson. The head of podcast is Alec McCabe and we'll see you next week. Bye. I hope that on the credits of the episode I get credit for UM tried to un pressing