Institute for Software Research
Managing Information in Multiple Working Spheres
Student: Victor M. Gonzalez
Advisor: Gloria Mark
This poster presents
results from the research we are conducting to examine how people manage
their work on multiple projects each with different goals, deadlines,
and resource constraints. Our results suggest that people organize their
work in terms of much larger and thematically connected units of work.
Yet paradoxically, most current designs of information technology support
individual tasks such as document writing and editing, using email, or
sending text or phone messages.
Based on the observation of information workers in three different roles:
analysts, software developers, and managers, we discovered that they experience
a high level of discontinuity in the execution of their activities. People
average about three minutes on a task and about two minutes using a tool
or paper document before switching tasks. We introduce the concept of
working spheres to explain the inherent way in which individuals conceptualize
and organize their basic units of work. People worked in an average of
ten working spheres per day. Working spheres are also fragmented people
spend about 12 minutes in a working sphere before they switch to another.
We argue that information technology design needs to support peopleâs
continual switching between working spheres.
Comments and questions: Debra A. Brodbeck, ISR Technical Relations Director, brodbeck@uci.edu