OFFICE workers who find themselves constantly disrupted by phone calls, e-mail and instant messages will soon be able to fend off such distractions with software that will help them prioritise the flood of information they face.
Scientists in the United States are developing new modes of e-mail and phone messaging that can wait patiently for an opportune time to interrupt, BusinessWeek magazine reported last Friday.
These innovations, based on the computer science of attentional user interfaces, are about finding ways to reap benefits from the data deluge without affecting the workers' concentration, said the magazine, quoting Dr Scott E. Hudson at Carnegie Mellon University.
One solution includes creating a workplace supported by digital assistants that use artificial intelligence to observe employees at work, BusinessWeek reported.
These software programs, installed on computers and other gadgets, watch and listen to the user.
They track digital calendars, note key contacts and apply mathematical formulae to predict the cost and benefit of interrupting someone at work, said the magazine.
According to Basex, a business research company in New York City, an office worker is typically interrupted once every three minutes - from answering the phone and checking e-mail to clicking over to YouTube and posting something amusing on Facebook.
BusinessWeek said that these distractions consume as much as 28 per cent of the average US worker's day - including recovery time - and they affect productivity to the tune of US$650 billion (S$896.7 billion) a year.
Most workers switch gears every few minutes, and once they are distracted, it can take nearly 30 minutes to get back on track, said the magazine, quoting Dr Gloria Mark at the University of California, who monitored thousands of hours of workplace behaviour for research.
Some of the tools that can help cut such distractions include a program called Priorities, that ranks e-mail messages according to their urgency, said BusinessWeek.
It inspired Microsoft to create Outlook Mobile Manager, a product that recognises urgent e-mail messages and does a presence forecasting - letting the software decide whether e-mail messages should be routed to the user's computer, phone or some other device.
BusinessWeek said that future versions of Windows will likely include another feature called Bounded Deferral, which holds messages in reserve until the recipient is ready to deal with it.
IBM is also testing a prototype of an instant-messaging answering machine known as IMSavvy that allows messages to tap gently at the employee's consciousness.
The program can sense when the worker is away or busy by his or her typing and mouse-usage patterns.
It then tells would-be interrupters whether the worker is available, BusinessWeek reported.
The magazine said that future versions may gauge when to interrupt by using audio sensors - that is, whether the person is busy talking on the phone or having a face-to-face discussion.
