We need to disconnect to make sense of all this

In my regular scanning of my RSS feed from The media section of The Guardian, I came across this heading and it immediately grabbed my attention as it resonated with thoughts I am currently processing. Jemima Kiss has written a blog entry on the Week Notes section of The Guardian's web site. She starts....

I gave an internal presentation this week on distraction, overload and how we need a better balance of wired and unwired time. Because very little at the Guardian is internal any more (we are all mutualised, after all) I'm going to share it. Less a presentation and more a collection of thoughts and observations, this is about a kind of digital crisis I find myself in. That's partly down to the pressures of the job, commuting and being mother to a little fellow, which puts more pressure on my time and my (already admittedly unrealistic) personal expectations of how much work I could and should be producing.
I've written before about trying to shift away from that world of frenetic, short-form blogging to more in-depth, feature-style posts. Breaking off from our playground of distracting techness is part of that. My posts about email are part of that too - it is a medium designed by accident which was never intended to be used this way. Can't we do something better, something bespoke?

To read the rest of this and to see the Prezi she produced go to Week Notes Blog.

One of the statistics she quotes is that it can take 15 minutes to recover from a one minute interruption. I would certainly agree with that from my own experience. It takes me much less time per day if I 'do' my email in a few intensive blocks rather than keep breaking off to see what emails have come in recently. But as Jemima says there is an expectation with email that you are considered rude if you don't reply instantly.

Your comments would be most welcome...