Ho do you manage your interruptions?

The myth of multitasking:

… [a] research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.”

Stanford study: Cognitive control in media multitaskers:

Results showed that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set.

Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times Magazine (10/16/05) (based on research by Gloria Mark, University of California)

Research shows that 40 percent of the time, workers ramble along a different tangent when an interruption ends because their short-term memory has been disrupted.