text: We report from the Do Not Disturb Challenge where 30 volunteers disabled notification alerts for 24 hours across all devices. The effect of the absence of notifications on the participants was isolated through an experimental study design: we compared self-reported feedback from the day without notifications against a baseline day. The evidence indicates that notifications have locked us in a dilemma: without notifications, participants felt less distracted and more productive. But, they also felt no longer able to be as responsive as expected, which made some participants anxious. And, they felt less connected with one's social group. In contrast to previous reports, about two third of the participants expressed the intention to change how they manage notifications. Two years later, half of the participants are still following through with their plans.
  @cite_7: We describe a study on the influence of instant messaging (IM) on ongoing computing tasks. The study both replicates and extends earlier work on the cost of sending notifications at different times and the sensitivity of different tasks to interruption. We investigate alternative hypotheses about the nature of disruption for a list evaluation task, an activity identified as being particularly costly to interrupt. Our findings once again show the generally disruptive effects of IM, especially during fast, stimulus-driven search tasks. In addition, we show that interruptions coming early during a search task are more likely to result in the user forgetting the primary task goal than interruptions that arrive later on. These findings have implications for the design of user interfaces and notification policies that minimize the disruptiveness of notifications.
  @cite_21: Smartphone users might be interrupted while interacting with an application, either by intended or unintended circumstances. In this paper, we report on a large-scale observational study that investigated mobile application interruptions in two scenarios: (1) intended back and forth switching between applications and (2) unintended interruptions caused by incoming phone calls. Our findings reveal that these interruptions rarely happen (at most 10 of the daily application usage), but when they do, they may introduce a significant overhead (can delay completion of a task by up to 4 times). We conclude with a discussion of the results, their limitations, and a series of implications for the design of mobile phones.
  @cite_1: In contemporary knowledge work organizations, work is often accomplished through communication. Consequently, communication disruptions often translate into work disruptions. In this paper, we identify two types of communication disruptions with implications for the relative organization of work: delays and interruptions. Communication delays contribute to work disorganization when a worker is unable to move forward with a task due to insufficient information, while interruptions derail the flow of activities directed toward the accomplishment of a task. Communication technologies are often designed with the intention of improving work organization by reducing communication delays (first-order effect), but the use of these technologies may, in practice, inadvertently contribute to an increase in work interruptions (second-order effect). We illustrate these first and second-order impacts of communication media use in a descriptive model. Then, using this model as our point of departure, we draw on prior research on personal control, relationships, and organizational culture to offer testable propositions regarding likely worker responses (third-order effect) to either communication delays or interruptions with further implications for the organization of work. Our argument suggests that communication technology use may not result in either more or less organized work overall but, rather, may simply shift the locus of control over the flow of work.
  @cite_39: User attention is a scarce resource, and users are susceptible to interruption overload. Systems do not reason about the effects of interrupting a user during a task sequence. In this study, we measure effects of interrupting a user at different moments within task execution in terms of task performance, emotional state, and social attribution. Task models were developed using event perception techniques, and the resulting models were used to identify interruption timings based on a user's predicted cognitive load. Our results show that different interruption moments have different impacts on user emotional state and positive social attribution, and suggest that a system could enable a user to maintain a high level of awareness while mitigating the disruptive effects of interruption. We discuss implications of these results for the design of an attention manager.
  @cite_0: It is well documented that interacting with a mobile phone is associated with poorer performance on concurrently performed tasks because limited attentional resources must be shared between tasks. However, mobile phones generate auditory or tactile notifications to alert users of incoming calls and messages. Although these notifications are generally short in duration, they can prompt task-irrelevant thoughts, or mind wandering, which has been shown to damage task performance. We found that cellular phone notifications alone significantly disrupted performance on an attention-demanding task, even when participants did not directly interact with a mobile device during the task. The magnitude of observed distraction effects was comparable in magnitude to those seen when users actively used a mobile phone, either for voice calls or text messaging. (PsycINFO Database Record Keywords: Driver distraction; Language: en
  @cite_19: Notifications on mobile phones alert users about new messages, emails, social network updates, and other events. However, little is understood about the nature and effect of such notifications on the daily lives of mobile users. We report from a one-week, in-situ study involving 15 mobile phones users, where we collected real-world notifications through a smartphone logging application alongside subjective perceptions of those notifications through an online diary. We found that our participants had to deal with 63.5 notifications on average per day, mostly from messengers and email. Whether the phone is in silent mode or not, notifications were typically viewed within minutes. Social pressure in personal communication was amongst the main reasons given. While an increasing number of notifications was associated with an increase in negative emotions, receiving more messages and social network updates also made our participants feel more connected with others. Our findings imply that avoiding interruptions from notifications may be viable for professional communication, while in personal communication, approaches should focus on managing expectations.
  @cite_27: Desktop notifications are designed to provide awareness of information while a user is attending to a primary task. Unfortunately the awareness can come with the price of disruption to the focal task. We review results of a field study on the use and perceived value of email notifications in the workplace. We recorded users' interactions with software applications for two weeks and studied how notifications or their forced absence influenced users' quest for awareness of new email arrival, as well as the impact of notifications on their overall task focus. Results showed that users view notifications as a mechanism to provide passive awareness rather than a trigger to switch tasks. Turing off notifications cause some users to self interrupt more to explicitly monitor email arrival, while others appear to be able to better focus on their tasks. Users acknowledge notifications as disruptive, yet opt for them because of their perceived value in providing awareness.
  @cite_40: We present a novel system for notification management and report results from two studies testing its performance and impact. The system uses statistical models to realize defer-to-breakpoint policies for managing notifications. The first study tested how well the models detect three types of breakpoints within novel task sequences. Results show that the models detect breakpoints reasonably well, but struggle to differentiate their type. Our second study explored effects of managing notifications with our system on users and their tasks. Results showed that scheduling notifications at breakpoints reduces frustration and reaction time relative to delivering them immediately. We also found that the relevance of notification content determines the type of breakpoint at which it should be delivered. The core concept of scheduling notifications at breakpoints fits well with how users prefer notifications to be managed. This indicates that users would likely adopt the use of notification management systems in practice.
  @cite_5: A common assumption in studies of interruptions is that one is focused in an activity and then distracted by other stimuli. We take the reverse perspective and examine whether one might first be in an attentional state that makes one susceptible to communications typically associated with distraction. We explore the confluence of multitasking and workplace communications from three temporal perspectives -- prior to an interaction, when tasks and communications are interleaved, and at the end of the day. Using logging techniques and experience sampling, we observed 32 employees in situ for five days. We found that certain attentional states lead people to be more susceptible to particular types of interaction. Rote work is followed by more Facebook or face-to-face interaction. Focused and aroused states are followed by more email. The more time in email and face-fo-face interaction, and the more total screen switches, the less productive people feel at the day's end. We present the notion of emotional homeostasis along with new directions for multitasking research.
  @cite_20: We report on a diary study of the activities of information workers aimed at characterizing how people interleave multiple tasks amidst interruptions. The week-long study revealed the type and complexity of activities performed, the nature of the interruptions experienced, and the difficulty of shifting among numerous tasks. We present key findings from the diary study and discuss implications of the findings. Finally, we describe promising directions in the design of software tools for task management, motivated by the findings.
summary: Distraction & Productivity Impairment Since people receive plenty of notifications, by sheer probability, notifications are bound to appear from time to time while the receiver is busy with other tasks. Since people usually attend to notifications within minutes, notifications may sometimes interrupt those other tasks. Such interruptions can have negative effects: previous work in the context of information workers has found that notifications negatively affect work efficiency when delivered in the middle of a work task @cite_39 @cite_20 @cite_40 @cite_27 @cite_21 @cite_1 @cite_0 , and the effect is more pronounced when the task is cognitively demanding @cite_7 @cite_5 . As found by Stothart @cite_0 , this is even true when the notification is not attended, as tested in a controlled exam setting. Hence, previous work consistently highlights the disruptive effects of notifications in work settings. Mobile phone users also expressed to frequently feel interrupted by notifications, even outside of work settings @cite_19 . We hypothesize that the absence of notifications will have positive effects on productivity.