Social technologies and time interruptions

This is an analysis of how to strategically think about adopting a new social technology – if you value your freedom that is.

The DATA: I asked a lot of my friends about what isthe time they think that occurs between interruptions, if one has access to any of the social technologies listed below – and here are the results: (for all practical purposes “Boss” is considered as a technology)

The data as reported by 78 people

I assumed (as is usual with interruption times) that the data is exponentially distributed. I ran a descriptive statistics analysis on the above data and had the following results:

Descriptive Statistics

I plotted the exponential distribution of these interruption times and it looked like this:

Based on this distribution I calculated the cumulative probability of being interrupted in T minutes:

In fact if we introduce a factor “probability of being without interruptions” called “free probability” which is just 1 minus the probability of getting interrupted, then we get an exponential distribution:

Looking closely at the results and consolidating a few results we see that:

Insights

If one adopts the technologies (as a means of communication) in decreasing order of Interruptions -> Mobile Phone -> Boss -> Pager -> Email etc. then the biggest compromise on freedom from interruptions occurs from Email to SMS. After which there is a steady sacrifice of 7% of one’s time with the adoption of every new technology till RSS Updates. Beyond RSS Updates if one adopts Twitter as a primary social technology the probability of having free time in every 5 minutes is just 4.67%!!

The critical decisions then are really in moving from Email to SMS and then from RSS to Twitter. Any adoption of newer technology outside those two “jumps” hardly makes any difference to the free time you have.

So if you are addicted to Facebook, MySpace, Blogs and RSS…carefully consider if you *really* want to add Twitter to your social portfolio!!