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"Advice on how to cope in this “always connected” age is plentiful: How to prioritize work better, manage your time more effectively across different domains of your life, survive email overload and even remedy your smartphone addiction. The trouble is that there is only so much that you can do alone: You can decide to turn off, but that does not mean everyone else will too."

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"Most of us have had a boss who preached teamwork. Some bosses even like to put up posters with slogans like there is no "I" in team.

Teamwork is essential to organizational success but too much teamwork can be deadly. This is the point that Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, argues in an essay for the The New York Times. She points out the drawbacks of too much teaming. "Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption," she writes."

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"Le "syndrome de déconcentration", mal du XXIe siècle ? La multiplication des chaînes télévisées a habitué notre cerveau au zapping. Depuis, notre environnement quotidien est en ébullition. Internet et les e-mails, les téléphones portables puis les smartphones et les tablettes tactiles, sans compter les tweets, nous ont rendus peu à peu multitâches, surstimulés mais pas si fiers de l'être. "

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"Canon France a organisé le 3 décembre 2010 pour la première fois une "journée sans mail" destinée à favoriser le bien être au travail. Saluons l'initiative qui a le mérite de reconnaître que la réception de nombreux emails peut-être facteur de stress, et qu'une politique RH de bien-être au travail doit aussi passer par la régulation de l'infobésité en entreprise.

Dans une étude publiée l'an dernier, l'entreprise Intel affichait déjà des chiffres préoccupants sur l'inflation informationnelle:

* Les salariés traitent entre 50 et 100 emails par jour, les dirigeants pouvant traiter jusqu'à 300 emails
* Le volume d'emails reçu nécessite en moyenne 4 heures par jour pour les traiter
* 30 % des emails sont inutiles"

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"We have a brain with billions of neurons and many trillion of connections, but we seem incapable of doing multiple things at the same time. Sadly, multitasking does not exist, at least not as we think about it. We instead switch tasks. Our brain chooses which information to process. For example, if you listen to speech, your visual cortex becomes less active, so when you talk on the phone to a client and work on your computer at the same time, you literally hear less of what the client is saying. "

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Concrètement, « le temps de travail des Français est de plus en plus morcelé. Dominés par l’informatique et les télécommunications, les salariés sont sollicités en permanence par la messagerie interne, les messages instantanés, les appels téléphoniques, les SMS et toutes sortes d’alertes. »
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Using tools which provide you with central hub for communication (such as a wiki), instead of directly contacting each individual person, allows you to reduce the number of connections involved. This, in turn, reduces the number of interruptions and the number versions of the document that are generated, making the discussion much more manageable. Furthermore, if the article is in a wiki, then it becomes search-able by all the users of the wiki too, so other people can find it again in the future. This is not the case if it’s stuck in someone’s inbox.

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Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time. At first that might sound confusing; at one level the brain does multitask. You can walk and talk at the same time. Your brain controls your heartbeat while you read a book. Pianists can play a piece with left hand and right hand simultaneously. Surely this is multitasking. But I am talking about the brain’s ability to pay attention. It is the resource you forcibly deploy while trying to listen to a boring lecture at school. It is the activity that collapses as your brain wanders during a tedious presentation at work. This attentional ability is not capable of multitasking.

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In a study last year, Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email (bit.ly/email2). So people who check their email every five minutes waste 81/2hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.

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In this experiment 300 engineers and managers, located in two US sites (Austin, TX and Chandler, AZ), agreed to minimize interruptions and distractions every Tuesday morning. During these periods they had all set their email and IM clients to “offline”, forwarded their phones to voice mail, avoided setting up meetings, and isolated themselves from “visitors” by putting up a “Do not disturb” sign at their doorway. The purpose was to see the effect of 4 hours of contiguous “thinking time”.

On the whole, the 7-month pilot returned markedly positive results. It has been successful in improving employee effectiveness, efficiency and quality of life for numerous employees in diverse job roles. 45% of post-pilot survey respondents had found it effective as is, and 71% recommended we consider extending it to other groups, possibly after applying some modifications

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