Coping with Work Fragmentation: An Information Worker's Perspective

Poster

Abstract: 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.

Bio: Victor González is a Ph.D. student in ICS, in the Information and Collaboration Technologies (ICT) group, working with Dr. Gloria Mark. He has done research on Distributed Collaboration, Information Visualization Systems and Home Technologies using both Qualitative and Quantitative methods. Currently he is working with Dr. Mark conducting research on Attention Management and Information Integration. In specific he is studying how people work within media-rich and activity-rich environments. He received a M.S. in Information and Computer Science (2002) from UC Irvine, a M.S. in Telecommunication and Information Systems from The University of Essex, UK and a B.S. in Electronic Communications from the Tech of Monterrey, Mexico.