DE-Multitasking "don´t disturb" - guidance on how to avoid stress and overload (in German) 15.02.2012
The German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA) has just published a brochure on how to tackle stress and overload linked to frequent interruptions and the demand for multitasking. The brochure is one of the outcomes of a project that attempted to identify good working practices to support an ageing working population.
It provides advice on what enterprises and individual workers can do to avoid stress linked to frequent interruptions. New scientific studies reveal the hidden costs of multitasking, key findings as technology increasingly tempts people to do more than one thing (and increasingly, more than one complicated thing) at a time. Researchers from the university of Michigan studied patterns in the amounts of time lost when people switched repeatedly between two tasks of varying complexity and familiarity. The measurements revealed that for all types of tasks, subjects lost time when they had to switch from one task to another, and time costs increased with the complexity of the tasks, so it took significantly longer to switch between more complex tasks. Time costs also were greater when subjects switched to tasks that were relatively unfamiliar. They got "up to speed" faster when they switched to tasks they knew better, an observation that may lead to interfaces designed to help overcome people's innate cognitive limitations.
Following these findings, the main advice is to let the workers decide which task has priority and provide them with the means to pick up again on what they had interrupted.
Workers should also have the possibility to choose at which moment to interrupt an ongoing task.
Finally, the guide explains how to set up "health panels" and start up a dialogue at enterprise level on how to tackle frequent interruptions.
EU-OSHA information on stress at work
Report: Mental health promotion in the workplace – A good practice report
