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Looking Up Information in Email: Feedback on Visit Durations Discourages Distractions

Published: 20 April 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Data entry often involves looking up information from email. Task switching to email can be disruptive, and people can get distracted and forget to return to their primary task. In this paper, we investigate whether giving people feedback on how long they are away from their task has any effect on the duration and number of their switches. An online experiment was conducted in which participants had to enter numeric codes into an online spreadsheet. They had to look up these codes in an email sent to their personal email address upon starting the experiment. People who were shown how long they were away for made shorter switches, were faster to complete the task and made fewer data entry errors. This suggests feedback on switching duration may make people more aware of their switching behaviour, and assist users in maintaining focus on their main task.

References

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Cited By

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  • (2020)TimeToFocusACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/339604427:5(1-31)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2020
  • (2019)Monotasking or MultitaskingProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300649(1-14)Online publication date: 2-May-2019

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  1. Looking Up Information in Email: Feedback on Visit Durations Discourages Distractions

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '18: Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2018
    3155 pages
    ISBN:9781450356213
    DOI:10.1145/3170427
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Publication History

    Published: 20 April 2018

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    Author Tags

    1. data entry
    2. email
    3. notifications
    4. online experiment
    5. self-interruptions
    6. task switching

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    CHI EA '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 1,208 of 3,955 submissions, 31%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

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    View all
    • (2020)TimeToFocusACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/339604427:5(1-31)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2020
    • (2019)Monotasking or MultitaskingProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300649(1-14)Online publication date: 2-May-2019

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