Not Right Now! Cognitive and Behavioral Impacts of IT interruption Timing

Research in IT interruptions has shown that interruptions are frequently extremely detrimental to task performance. Past work has indicated that timing interruptions such that they occur on natural task boundaries can reduce the negative impact of the interruption. However, these interventions may not be very practical outside the laboratory. However, there has been significant research done in other realms which suggests that other types of time than the event time used in the interruptions literature might be implicated as well. We propose that timing interruptions on natural chunks of time may also ameliorate the negative effects of interruptions and be easier to implement. We propose a 2x2 laboratory study to validate our hypotheses