We report from the Do Not Disturb Challenge where 30 volunteers disabled notification alerts for 24 hours across all devices. The effect of the absence of notifications on the participants was isolated through an experimental study design: we compared self-reported feedback from the day without notifications against a baseline day. The evidence indicates that notifications have locked us in a dilemma: without notifications, participants felt less distracted and more productive. But, they also felt no longer able to be as responsive as expected, which made some participants anxious. And, they felt less connected with one's social group. In contrast to previous reports, about two third of the participants expressed the intention to change how they manage notifications. Two years later, half of the participants are still following through with their plans.
Notifications & Stress In addition to negative effects on work efficiency, interruptions can also affect people emotionally. Interruptions in the workplace have been linked to frustration @cite_40 and stress @cite_38 . In the context of notifications, information workers felt significantly less stressed without email @cite_33 , without email notifications @cite_27 , or when checking work email was restricted to 3 times per day @cite_13 . However, work emails no longer reach us at only work. Our mobile devices may notify us about incoming emails at any time, which blurs the boundaries between work and private life @cite_6 @cite_16 . Stress levels were found to positively correlate with the number of mobile phone notifications from, in particular, email clients @cite_19 , which indicates that email notifications are particularly problematic. Mobile phone notifications in general have been linked to inattention and hyperactivity @cite_4 . On the basis of this related work, we hypothesize that the absence of notifications will reduce stress and other negative emotions.
@cite_38 @cite_4 @cite_33 @cite_6 @cite_19 @cite_40 @cite_27 @cite_16 @cite_13
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As smartphones increasingly pervade our daily lives, people are ever more interrupted by alerts and notifications. Using both correlational and experimental methods, we explored whether such interruptions might be causing inattention and hyperactivity-symptoms associated with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) even in people not clinically diagnosed with ADHD. We recruited a sample of 221 participants from the general population. For one week, participants were assigned to maximize phone interruptions by keeping notification alerts on and their phones within their reach sight. During another week, participants were assigned to minimize phone interruptions by keeping alerts off and their phones away. Participants reported higher levels of inattention and hyperactivity when alerts were on than when alerts were off. Higher levels of inattention in turn predicted lower productivity and psychological well-being. These findings highlight some of the costs of ubiquitous connectivity and suggest how people can reduce these costs simply by adjusting existing phone settings. Notifications on mobile phones alert users about new messages, emails, social network updates, and other events. However, little is understood about the nature and effect of such notifications on the daily lives of mobile users. We report from a one-week, in-situ study involving 15 mobile phones users, where we collected real-world notifications through a smartphone logging application alongside subjective perceptions of those notifications through an online diary. We found that our participants had to deal with 63.5 notifications on average per day, mostly from messengers and email. Whether the phone is in silent mode or not, notifications were typically viewed within minutes. Social pressure in personal communication was amongst the main reasons given. While an increasing number of notifications was associated with an increase in negative emotions, receiving more messages and social network updates also made our participants feel more connected with others. Our findings imply that avoiding interruptions from notifications may be viable for professional communication, while in personal communication, approaches should focus on managing expectations. A common assumption in studies of interruptions is that one is focused in an activity and then distracted by other stimuli. We take the reverse perspective and examine whether one might first be in an attentional state that makes one susceptible to communications typically associated with distraction. We explore the confluence of multitasking and workplace communications from three temporal perspectives -- prior to an interaction, when tasks and communications are interleaved, and at the end of the day. Using logging techniques and experience sampling, we observed 32 employees in situ for five days. We found that certain attentional states lead people to be more susceptible to particular types of interaction. Rote work is followed by more Facebook or face-to-face interaction. Focused and aroused states are followed by more email. The more time in email and face-fo-face interaction, and the more total screen switches, the less productive people feel at the day's end. We present the notion of emotional homeostasis along with new directions for multitasking research. Limiting the frequency of checking email throughout the day reduced daily stress.Lower daily stress predicts greater well-being (e.g., higher positive affect).The frequency of checking email did not directly impact other well-being outcomes. Using email is one of the most common online activities in the world today. Yet, very little experimental research has examined the effect of email on well-being. Utilizing a within-subjects design, we investigated how the frequency of checking email affects well-being over a period of two weeks. During one week, 124 adults were randomly assigned to limit checking their email to three times a day; during the other week, participants could check their email an unlimited number of times per day. We found that during the limited email use week, participants experienced significantly lower daily stress than during the unlimited email use week. Lower stress, in turn, predicted higher well-being on a diverse range of well-being outcomes. These findings highlight the benefits of checking email less frequently for reducing psychological stress. We report on an empirical study where we cut off email usage for five workdays for 13 information workers in an organization. We employed both quantitative measures such as computer log data and ethnographic methods to compare a baseline condition (normal email usage) with our experimental manipulation (email cutoff). Our results show that without email, people multitasked less and had a longer task focus, as measured by a lower frequency of shifting between windows and a longer duration of time spent working in each computer window. Further, we directly measured stress using wearable heart rate monitors and found that stress, as measured by heart rate variability, was lower without email. Interview data were consistent with our quantitative measures, as participants reported being able to focus more on their tasks. We discuss the implications for managing email better in organizations. We describe a study on the influence of instant messaging (IM) on ongoing computing tasks. The study both replicates and extends earlier work on the cost of sending notifications at different times and the sensitivity of different tasks to interruption. We investigate alternative hypotheses about the nature of disruption for a list evaluation task, an activity identified as being particularly costly to interrupt. Our findings once again show the generally disruptive effects of IM, especially during fast, stimulus-driven search tasks. In addition, we show that interruptions coming early during a search task are more likely to result in the user forgetting the primary task goal than interruptions that arrive later on. These findings have implications for the design of user interfaces and notification policies that minimize the disruptiveness of notifications. Desktop notifications are designed to provide awareness of information while a user is attending to a primary task. Unfortunately the awareness can come with the price of disruption to the focal task. We review results of a field study on the use and perceived value of email notifications in the workplace. We recorded users' interactions with software applications for two weeks and studied how notifications or their forced absence influenced users' quest for awareness of new email arrival, as well as the impact of notifications on their overall task focus. Results showed that users view notifications as a mechanism to provide passive awareness rather than a trigger to switch tasks. Turing off notifications cause some users to self interrupt more to explicitly monitor email arrival, while others appear to be able to better focus on their tasks. Users acknowledge notifications as disruptive, yet opt for them because of their perceived value in providing awareness. It is well documented that interacting with a mobile phone is associated with poorer performance on concurrently performed tasks because limited attentional resources must be shared between tasks. However, mobile phones generate auditory or tactile notifications to alert users of incoming calls and messages. Although these notifications are generally short in duration, they can prompt task-irrelevant thoughts, or mind wandering, which has been shown to damage task performance. We found that cellular phone notifications alone significantly disrupted performance on an attention-demanding task, even when participants did not directly interact with a mobile device during the task. The magnitude of observed distraction effects was comparable in magnitude to those seen when users actively used a mobile phone, either for voice calls or text messaging. (PsycINFO Database Record Keywords: Driver distraction; Language: en A notification represents the proactive delivery of information to a user and reduces the need to visually scan or repeatedly check an external information source. At the same time, notifications often interrupt user tasks at inopportune moments, decreasing productivity and increasing frustration. Controlled studies have shown that linking notification delivery to the perceptual structure of a user's tasks can reduce these interruption costs. However, in these studies, the scheduling was always performed manually, and it was not clear whether it would be possible for a system to mimic similar techniques. This article contributes the design and implementation of a novel system called Oasis that aligns notification scheduling with the perceptual structure of user tasks. We describe the architecture of the system, how it detects task structure on the fly without explicit knowledge of the task itself, and how it layers flexible notification scheduling policies on top of this detection mechanism. The system also includes an offline tool for creating customized statistical models for detecting task structure. The value of our system is that it intelligently schedules notifications, enabling the reductions in interruption costs shown within prior controlled studies to now be realized by users in everyday desktop computing tasks. It also provides a test bed for experimenting with how notification management policies and other system functionalities can be linked to task structure. This study examines how technology-mediated cross-domain interruptions affect people’s work and personal life on two aspects: level of conflict between work and personal life and people’s ability to fulfill their responsibilities in each of the two domains. Based on the direction of an interruption, we differentiate between two types of cross-domain interruptions: work-to-nonwork (WTN) and nonwork-to-work (NTW). Drawing on interruption research and work-life interaction literature, we conceptualize distinct effects of the two interruption types on outcome variables. Data were collected through surveys from 137 knowledge workers. Results reveal asymmetric effects of WTN and NTW interruptions on work and personal life. The frequency of WTN interruptions is found to be positively associated with work-life conflict and negatively associated with fulfillment of personal life responsibilities, whereas the frequency of NTW interruptions significantly affects fulfillment of work responsibilities but not work-life conflict. Thus, results point to asymmetrically permeable boundaries between work and personal life. Results also suggest that the effects of WTN interruptions on fulfillment of personal life responsibilities are partially mediated by WTN conflict. The study concludes with implications for research and practice. Much of the stress and strain of student life remains hidden. The StudentLife continuous sensing app assesses the day-to-day and week-by-week impact of workload on stress, sleep, activity, mood, sociability, mental well-being and academic performance of a single class of 48 students across a 10 week term at Dartmouth College using Android phones. Results from the StudentLife study show a number of significant correlations between the automatic objective sensor data from smartphones and mental health and educational outcomes of the student body. We also identify a Dartmouth term lifecycle in the data that shows students start the term with high positive affect and conversation levels, low stress, and healthy sleep and daily activity patterns. As the term progresses and the workload increases, stress appreciably rises while positive affect, sleep, conversation and activity drops off. The StudentLife dataset is publicly available on the web. In this study, we aim to find physiological or behavioral markers for stress. We collected 5 days of data for 18 participants: a wrist sensor (accelerometer and skin conductance), mobile phone usage (call, short message service, location and screen on off) and surveys (stress, mood, sleep, tiredness, general health, alcohol or caffeinated beverage intake and electronics usage). We applied correlation analysis to find statistically significant features associated with stress and used machine learning to classify whether the participants were stressed or not. In comparison to a baseline 87.5 accuracy using the surveys, our results showed over 75 accuracy in a binary classification using screen on, mobility, call or activity level information (some showed higher accuracy than the baseline). The correlation analysis showed that the higher-reported stress level was related to activity level, SMS and screen on off patterns. Smartphones have become an indispensable part of everyday life. By this time, push notifications are at the core of many apps, proactively pushing new content to users. These notifications may raise awareness, but also have the downside of being disruptive. In this paper we present a laboratory study investigating users' attitudes towards notifications and how they deal with notification settings on their smartphones. Permission requests for sending push notifications on iOS don't inform the user about the nature of notifications of this app, leaving the user to make a rather uninformed choice on whether to accept or deny. We show that requests including explanations are significantly more likely to be accepted. Our results further indicate that apart from being disruptive, notifications may create stress due to information overload. Notification settings, once assigned a preset, are rarely changed, although not necessarily matching the favored one. We performed an empirical study to investigate whether the context of interruptions makes a difference. We found that context does not make a difference but surprisingly, people completed interrupted tasks in less time with no difference in quality. Our data suggests that people compensate for interruptions by working faster, but this comes at a price: experiencing more stress, higher frustration, time pressure and effort. Individual differences exist in the management of interruptions: personality measures of openness to experience and need for personal structure predict disruption costs of interruptions. We discuss implications for how system design can support interrupted work. Human multitasking is often the result of self-initiated interruptions in the performance of an ongoing task. These self-interruptions occur in the absence of external triggers such as electronic alerts or email notifications. Compared to externally induced interruptions, self-interruptions have not received enough research attention. To address this gap, this paper develops a typology of self-interruptions based on the integration of Flow Theory and Self-regulation Theory. In this new typology, the two major categories stem from positive and negative feelings of task progress and prospects of goal attainment. The proposed classification is validated in an experimental multitasking environment with pre-defined tasks. Empirical findings indicate that negative feelings trigger more self-interruptions than positive feelings. In general, more self-interruptions result in lower accuracy in all tasks. The results suggest that negative internal triggers of self-interruptions unleash a downward spiral that may degrade performance. Social norm has it that people are expected to respond to mobile phone messages quickly. We investigate how attentive people really are and how timely they actually check and triage new messages throughout the day. By collecting more than 55,000 messages from 42 mobile phone users over the course of two weeks, we were able to predict people's attentiveness through their mobile phone usage with close to 80 accuracy. We found that people were attentive to messages 12.1 hours a day, i.e. 84.8 hours per week, and provide statistical evidence how very short people's inattentiveness lasts: in 75 of the cases mobile phone users return to their attentive state within 5 minutes. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of attentiveness throughout each hour of the day and show that intelligent notification delivery services, such as bounded deferral, can assume that inattentiveness will be rare and subside quickly. Almost every office worker can relate to feelings of email overload and stress, but in reality the concept of email strain is not well understood. In this paper, we describe a large-scale nationwide organizational survey examining the relationship between email use and feelings of email overload and task coordination. We found that higher email volume was associated with increased feelings of email overload, but this relationship was moderated by certain email management strategies. The contribution to the field of CSCW is a better understanding of the concept of email related stress, and initial scale development for the assessment of email-related overload and perceptions of the work-importance of email. Security researchers can send vulnerability notifications to take proactive measures in securing systems at scale. However, the factors affecting a notification’s efficacy have not been deeply explored. In this paper, we report on an extensive study of notifying thousands of parties of security issues present within their networks, with an aim of illuminating which fundamental aspects of notifications have the greatest impact on efficacy. The vulnerabilities used to drive our study span a range of protocols and considerations: exposure of industrial control systems; apparent firewall omissions for IPv6-based services; and exploitation of local systems in DDoS amplification attacks. We monitored vulnerable systems for several weeks to determine their rate of remediation. By comparing with experimental controls, we analyze the impact of a number of variables: choice of party to contact (WHOIS abuse contacts versus national CERTs versus US-CERT), message verbosity, hosting an information website linked to in the message, and translating the message into the notified party’s local language. We also assess the outcome of the emailing process itself (bounces, automated replies, human replies, silence) and characterize the sentiments and perspectives expressed in both the human replies and an optional anonymous survey that accompanied our notifications. We find that various notification regimens do result in different outcomes. The best observed process was directly notifying WHOIS contacts with detailed information in the message itself. These notifications had a statistically significant impact on improving remediation, and human replies were largely positive. However, the majority of notified contacts did not take action, and even when they did, remediation was often only partial. Repeat notifications did not further patching. These results are promising but ultimately modest, behooving the security community to more deeply investigate ways to improve the effectiveness of vulnerability notifications. We describe initial results from an ongoing project to use mobile phone sensors to detect stress related situations1. The questions that we address in this stage of our work in progress is whether differences between stressful and non stressful periods can be detected in information readily available on a smartphone such as location traces, BlueTooth devices seen during the day and phone call patterns. We present an experiment with 7 students who were monitored during a two week exam session (stressful situation) and the two following weeks (non stressful period). The results show that a behaviour modification can clearly be seen, although the exact interpretation and generalization requires further work and larger scale experiments. In contemporary knowledge work organizations, work is often accomplished through communication. Consequently, communication disruptions often translate into work disruptions. In this paper, we identify two types of communication disruptions with implications for the relative organization of work: delays and interruptions. Communication delays contribute to work disorganization when a worker is unable to move forward with a task due to insufficient information, while interruptions derail the flow of activities directed toward the accomplishment of a task. Communication technologies are often designed with the intention of improving work organization by reducing communication delays (first-order effect), but the use of these technologies may, in practice, inadvertently contribute to an increase in work interruptions (second-order effect). We illustrate these first and second-order impacts of communication media use in a descriptive model. Then, using this model as our point of departure, we draw on prior research on personal control, relationships, and organizational culture to offer testable propositions regarding likely worker responses (third-order effect) to either communication delays or interruptions with further implications for the organization of work. Our argument suggests that communication technology use may not result in either more or less organized work overall but, rather, may simply shift the locus of control over the flow of work.