Prospective memory

What it is

In Laura Dabbish, Gloria Mark and Víctor González's 2011 reanalysis of ninety-six days of shadowed office work, covering 5,089 observed work episodes, people were significantly more likely to self-interrupt into a central working sphere, twenty-three per cent against seventeen and nineteen per cent for the other categories, and to self-interrupt in order to do solitary work rather than to communicate, twenty-three per cent against sixteen. The authors read this as prospective memory at work, and say it suggests a potential positive aspect of self-interruption for the completion of key work tasks. An intention for the important thing surfaces, and you break off the less important thing to act on it.

In effect

On that reading, a good deal of what looks like distraction is the opposite: the mechanism that pulls you off a peripheral task and towards the one you are accountable for. The rival account sits in the same paper and is habit rather than memory. External interruptions in one hour increased self-interruptions in the next, with one additional external interruption associated with an eight per cent rise, while self-interruptions did not predict their own recurrence, which the authors read as people being conditioned to interrupt themselves. Both accounts are live and the paper carries both.

What it does not say

This is the authors' interpretation of their own observational data, not a test of it. They manipulated nothing, and they state themselves that time and external interruption accounted for only four per cent of the variance in self-interruption and that a large portion of the variance in the behaviour remains unexplained. The construct itself comes from a cognitive literature this vault has not audited, which is why no originator is recorded here rather than the nearest famous name being filled in. The dataset is also thirty-six people in three high-technology organisations, three workdays each, collected in the early 2000s.

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