Andrew Badham 2024-11-26 15:53:32
We know interruptions can have an impact on our focus, but how does it impact our situational awareness? Situational awareness is important when you have multiple potential tasks and you need to quickly decide which one needs your urgent attention. Air traffic controllers need this more than most people, which is why this study published in November 2024, wanted to know how interruptions affected their situational awareness.
As you can imagine, interruptions severely affected their situational awareness, but what is more interesting is how the type of interruption affected different types of tasks. In their experiment, they had auditory tasks and visual tasks, auditory interruptions and visual interruptions. They then ran different iterations of the experiment:
- Auditory – Auditory
- Auditory – Visual
- Visual – Visual
- Visual – Auditory
They found that the interruptions that were of the same type as the task had bigger impacts than those that were different.
So, if you’re someone who needs to have a high-level of situational awareness at work, try limit interruptions as much as you can, but especially those that are similar to the work you are doing. For example, if you have a lot of auditory work, put your phone on silent. Or, if you have a lot of visual work, turn off pop up notifications. Give it a try, and let me know if it works.