I won’t link to The New York Times anymore, but when Ross Mayfield quotes them, I don’t have to.
The story is that life is full of interruptions. The typical office environment today apparently allows workers “only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else.” Worse, “each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet.”
Interesting stuff. Mayfield points it out as a reason to build more awareness of this in our communication/social software. He also popped this link to Jon Udell’s post on attention economics.