Hewlett-Packard, the printer company, got a scientist into study their workers

and he split them into two groups and the first group was told,

get on with your task whatever it is and you're not going to be interrupted,

just do what you've got to do.

And the second group was told, get on with your task, whatever it is,

but at the same time you've got to answer a heavy load of email on phone calls,

so pretty much how most of us live.

And at the end of it, the scientist tested the IQ of both groups.

The group that had not been interrupted scored 10 IQ points higher than the group they had.

To give you a sense of how big that effect is,

if you want me sat down together and smoked a fast bluff right now,

our IQs would go down in the short term by five points.

So being chronically interrupted in the short term

is twice as bad for your intelligence and attention as getting stone.

You'd be better off sitting in your desk, getting stone to do one thing at a time

than you would sitting in your desk, not getting stone to have been constantly interrupted.

I don't want, don't want to get a wrong idea.

I might have had that experience for a time.

It's not, you don't know.

I'm John Favreau.

Welcome to Offline.

Hey, everyone, and Happy New Year.

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