Over at Critical Section, Ole Eichorn has a very insightful article entitled “The Tyranny of Email“. Despite being designed to be less disruptive than telephone calls, email often intrudes on our concentration and our productivity.

Email is one of the greatest things the computer revolution has done for personal productivity. Used improperly, it can also hurt your productivity. This article discusses ways to use email effectively. Then it goes beyond that and talks about how to be productive, period.

How often do you stop and check your mail when Outlook‘s envelope icon shows up in your system tray? How many times do you feel obligated to reply immediately to an email, even though you were in the middle of another task? How often are you cc’d on a message for no appreciable reason?

Ole has thought long about these issues and he has a list of 6 rules for taking control of your email. But he’s not stopping there. The distraction of email is just one of the distractions in the workplace, and he has several rules for dealing with phones, co-workers and general goofing-off.

One of his main observations is that “It takes three hours to get anything done.” He cites no research on this topic and his focus is on programming, but I believe this may be applicable to learning tasks. It seems a quantification of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of Flow. He says, that when you are in a 3-hour “zone”:

…you’ve spun up to speed, gathered your concentration, shifted into “right brain mode”, and are focusing on a problem. You’re being productive.

Many, if not most activities seem to take an orientation period or a warm-up to get ready. How are we allowing for this in designing learning activities? If we are delivering courseware in 1-hour chunks, how much of the learner’s time is being wasted in adapting to the courseware environment before she actually becomes a productive learner? And how often are we leaving the learning zone before it is necessary?