Constant, constant, multi-tasking craziness
González and Mark report fieldwork observing information workers in three roles: analysts, software developers and managers. Current information technology is designed around distinct tasks, but the workers organised their work in larger, thematically connected units. All three groups experienced a high level of discontinuity. People averaged about three minutes on a task and somewhat over two minutes using any electronic tool or paper document before switching. The authors introduce the notion of working spheres to describe these units.
González and Mark report fieldwork observing information workers in three roles: analysts, software developers and managers. Current information technology is designed around distinct tasks, but the workers organised their work in larger, thematically connected units. All three groups experienced a high level of discontinuity. People averaged about three minutes on a task and somewhat over two minutes using any electronic tool or paper document before switching. The authors introduce the notion of working spheres to describe these units.
Written from the abstract as shown on the OpenAlex record, read 2026-11-04.
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: managing multiple working spheres.' Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '04), 113-120. doi:10.1145/985692.985707.