CommLog

Seems a day doesn’t pass in which I don’t coach a leader to make themselves less interruptable -- to turn off the cell phone, and turn off the “auto-check” on his or her email and download messages only at times where they can process those messages. Crazy looks, I get to that advice. But we’re certain it’s good counsel, and now thanks to London’s Institute of Psychiatry, we have some data to back it up:

Scientists at London’s Institute of Psychiatry found that environments with distracting technologies lower IQ by an average of more than 10 points when compared with quiet conditions. By comparison, other research has shown that smoking marijuana causes just a 4-point drop. A 10-point reduction is similar to the impact of missing an entire night’s sleep.

The "distracting technologies" to which they refer: email and phone calls. Yes, unless it’s the only thing you’re attending to, email actually makes you dumb. David Allen chimes in:

Does it really mean we're dumber when we respond to communication? Hardly. I think it's just reflective of the almost universal problem most people have in dealing with input and interruptions - with no real personal system they can trust (which includes consistent processing behaviors, by the way), people feel compelled to engage with the input as it shows up. But because they can't really deal with it, they just add another loose bolt inside their engine.

I’ll toss a plug to David here as well: We’ve been using his GTD Outlook Add-In for some time at CRA, and it’s revolutionized how we handle our email traffic. Highly recommended.