Editor’s Corner:
TURNING LIFE INTO ONE LONG INTERRUPTION

The recent study, "Pitney Bowes’ Workplace Communications in the 21st Century," revealed that 34 per cent of the messages (e-mail, fax, telephone, regular mail, overnight courier) that workers receive disrupt their work and, on average, a worker is interrupted six times a day. Now that’s just from messaging activities. What about the real people around? Those friendly workers who stick their head in the door to chat, or the tea cart that rings its bell luring you away for a snack.

Interruptions are a long established way of life. Ads on the radio and TV, and now on Web sites, have become acceptable. Going from one hot link to another while you surf the web is exciting, adding an element of discovery to each new page you land on.

It’s not enough to have one phone conversation. We’ve let the phone companies convince us that we need call waiting, so that we can be interrupted for an important call. Later on the phone companies gave us *70, the digits you can dial before you call, to turn off call waiting, just in case you realized that you didn’t want to be interrupted.

Now the debate rages over direct e-mail marketing. Supposedly the main objection that drives the legal battle is the question of shifting the cost of advertising to the recipient. I think that’s really marginal and in some cases a non-issue. What people are up in arms about is that there is yet another channel that will have superfluous messages flowing through it, eating up valuable time better spent on managing the flow.

The average worker receives 190 messages a day. At a minute a message to read and answer each one - that’s more than three hours of the work day. Take an hour off for lunch and now you have only four hours left to do your work if you want to get out the door at 5 pm. (Who’s ever done that?)

It looks like we’ve gone overboard with our messaging. Most likely we need more technology to bring back the quiet and lessen these interruptions. Somebody out there, no doubt, will find a way to capitalize on this modern dilemma.