为何你无法读完这篇文章

In the few minutes it takes to read this article, chances are you'll pause to check your phone, answer a text, switch to your desktop to read an email from the boss's assistant, or glance at the Facebook or Twitter messages popping up in the corner of your screen. Off-screen, in your open-plan office, crosstalk about a colleague's preschooler might lure you away, or a co-worker may stop by your desk for a quick question.

看完这篇文章花不了几分钟，不过这期间你很有可能会停下来查手机、回短信、把电脑屏幕切换到电子邮件的页面去看老板助理给你发的邮件，或是瞥一眼屏幕角落里蹦出来的社交网站上的新信息。电脑屏幕之外，在你身处的这个开放式的办公室内，有人在谈论某位同事那个还未上学的孩子，这也让你分心，还可能会有同事过来问你个小问题。

And bosses wonder why it is tough to get any work done.

而老板们也总在纳闷：为什么完成一项工作这么难？

Distraction at the office is hardly new, but as screens multiply and managers push frazzled workers to do more with less, companies say the problem is worsening and is affecting business.

办公室里存在各种分散注意力的干扰因素，这当然并不是最近才有的现象。不过随着办公室中电脑数量成倍增加，老板们又总在逼着疲惫不堪的员工们少拿多干，各企业都发现，这类问题越来越严重了，而且对公司业务产生了影响。

While some firms make noises about workers wasting time on the Web, companies are realizing the problem is partly their own fault.

虽然有一些企业抱怨员工把太多的时间浪费在了互联网上，但各企业也开始意识到，这个问题一部分上是企业自己造成的。

Even though digital technology has led to significant productivity increases, the modern workday seems custom-built to destroy individual focus. Open-plan offices and an emphasis on collaborative work leave workers with little insulation from colleagues' chatter. A ceaseless tide of meetings and internal emails means that workers increasingly scramble to get their 'real work' done on the margins, early in the morning or late in the evening. And the tempting lure of social-networking streams and status updates make it easy for workers to interrupt themselves.

尽管数字技术让生产效率大为提高，但现代的工作方式简直就是为毁掉个人的注意力而量身定做的。开放式的办公环境以及对于团队协作的强调，让人们在同事们闲聊声的包围中几乎无处遁身。大小会议和内部邮件造就的无穷无尽的文山会海，让员工越来越难以找出时间完成自己“真正的工作，他们不得不挤出边角料的时间，利用一大早或是夜晚来加班。而大量来自社交网站的信息以及好友状况更新的诱惑，让人们一不小心就会分神。

'It is an epidemic,' says Lacy Roberson, a director of learning and organizational development at eBay Inc. At most companies, it's a struggle 'to get work done on a daily basis, with all these things coming at you,' she says.

在eBay Inc.负责学习与机构发展的主管莱西·罗伯逊(Lacy Roberson)说：“这是一种流行玻她表示，在大多数企业，“由于你要面对所有这些事情，要让每天的工作能在当日完成需要大费周章。

Office workers are interrupted─or self-interrupt─roughly every three minutes, academic studies have found, with numerous distractions coming in both digital and human forms. Once thrown off track, it can take some 23 minutes for a worker to return to the original task, says Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who studies digital distraction.

有学术研究发现，由于有大量的数字化的和人为的干扰因素，因此办公室职员基本上每三分钟就会被打搅──或是自我打搅──一次。加州大学欧文分校(University of California, Irvine)信息学教授、研究数字干扰的格洛丽雅·马克(Gloria Mark)说，一旦被打断，人们需要大约23分钟的时间重新回到其原先的工作。

Companies are experimenting with strategies to keep workers focused. Some are limiting internal emails─with one company moving to ban them entirely─while others are reducing the number of projects workers can tackle at a time.

各企业正在试行各种能够让员工专心的策略。有些企业限制内部邮件的使用──有一家企业甚至彻底禁止内部邮件──还有些企业在减少员工需要一次同时处理的项目的数量。

Last year, Jamey Jacobs, a divisional vice president at Abbott Vascular, a unit of health-care company Abbott Laboratories, learned that his 200 employees had grown stressed trying to squeeze in more heads-down, focused work amid the daily thrum of email and meetings.

去年，在医疗保健企业雅培公司(Abbott Laboratories)旗下子公司Abbott Vascular担任副总裁的杰姆·雅各布斯(Jamey Jacobs)了解到，他手下的200名员工因每日没完没了的电子邮件和会议的干扰而感觉压力越来越大，很难挤出时间来埋头专心工作。

'It became personally frustrating that they were not getting the things they wanted to get done,' he says. At meetings, attendees were often checking email, trying to multitask and in the process obliterating their focus.

他说：“这造成了一种个人挫败感，他们无法把自己想要做的事情做完。出席会议时，参会者总在查看电子邮件、试图同时处理几件事，这样的过程不断消磨着他们的注意力。

Part of the solution for Mr. Jacobs's team was that oft-forgotten piece of office technology: the telephone.

雅各布斯的团队提出的一个解决方案是，使用一个经常被忘却的办公室工具：电话。

Mr. Jacobs and productivity consultant Daniel Markovitz found that employees communicated almost entirely over email, whether the matter was mundane, such as cake in the break room, or urgent, like an equipment issue.

雅各布斯和公司的工作效率顾问丹尼尔·马考维茨(Daniel Markovitz)发现，员工之间的交流几乎完全依赖电子邮件，不管他们要谈论的是诸如休息室里有蛋糕之类的平常琐事，还是设备问题之类的紧急事项，都是如此。

The pair instructed workers to let the importance and complexity of their message dictate whether to use cellphones, office phones or email. Truly urgent messages and complex issues merited phone calls or in-person conversations, while email was reserved for messages that could wait.

他们要求员工根据信息的重要性和复杂程度来决定是要使用手机、办公室电话还是电子邮件。确实紧急的内容和复杂的事情可以用电话联系或是面对面的交流，而电子邮件只用来传递那些不需要着急处理的信息。

Workers now pick up the phone more, logging fewer internal emails and say they've got clarity on what's urgent and what's not, although Mr. Jacobs says staff still have to stay current with emails from clients or co-workers outside the group.

如今雅各布斯团队的员工们拿起电话的次数多起来了，内部邮件则有所减少，而且他们表示，自己很清楚哪些信息是紧急事项，哪些不是了，不过雅各布斯说，员工们仍然不得不经常查看来自客户和其他部门同事的最新邮件。

Ms. Roberson of eBay recently instituted a no-device policy during some team meetings, a change that she says has made gatherings more efficient.

eBay的罗伯逊近来在一些团队会议上制定了会上不许使用电子设备的规定。她表示，这一变化让会议变得更高效。

Not all workplace distractions harm productivity. Dr. Mark found that people tended to work faster when they anticipate interruptions, squeezing tasks into shorter intervals of time. Workers' accuracy suffered little amid frequent interruptions, but their stress rose significantly.

并非所有办公场合的干扰都会影响工作效率。马克博士发现，当人们预见到会有干扰时，他们的工作往往会完成得更快，会抓紧在更短的时间内将任务完成。在经常受到干扰的情况下，工作的准确程度会略受影响，而压力会大大增加。

Other studies have found that occasional, undemanding distractions, such as surfing the Web, can help increase creativity and reduce workplace monotony, which may help boost alertness.

另有研究显示，偶尔出现且无需耗费许多精力的干扰，比如说浏览网页，可以有助于增加创造力，并减少办公场所的枯燥感，从而有助于提高注意力。

Within Intel Corp.'s 14,000-person Software and Services group, workers were concerned that they weren't getting time to think deeply about problems because they spent much of their time keeping up with day-to-day tasks. So earlier this fall, managers decided to pilot a program allowing employees to block out several hours a week for heads-down work.

在英特尔公司(Intel Corp.)拥有1.4万名员工的软件与服务部门内，人们担心，由于他们不得不将大量时间用于应付每日的工作，他们将没有时间对问题进行深入的思考。因此，今年秋天，该公司的管理层决定试行一个项目，让员工每周有几个小时可以用来埋头工作。

During four weekly hours of 'think time'─tracked via group calendar and spreadsheet─workers aren't expected to respond to emails or attend meetings, unless it's urgent, or if they're working on collaborative projects.

在每周四小时的“思考时间里（这段时间将有部门日历和数据表予以记录），员工们不用回邮件，也不用出席会议，除非事情十分紧急，或是他们正在参与一个合作项目。

Already, at least one employee has developed a patent application in those hours, while others have caught up on the work they're unable to get to during frenetic workdays, says Linda April, a manager in the group.

该部门的一位经理琳达·阿普瑞(Linda April)表示，已经至少有一位员工利用这些“思考时间开发出来了一项拥有专利的应用软件，其他人也在赶着做那些他们在狂乱的工作日内无法完成的工作。

Dozens of software firms have developed products to tame worker inboxes, ranging from task-management software to programs that screen and sort email, but their effectiveness is limited without organizational change.

有几十家软件公司已开发出一些产品来帮助员工管理邮箱，从任务管理软件到为电子邮件进行屏蔽和分类的程序，不过，如果没有组织方式上的改变，这些产品的效果相当有限。

Perhaps no company has taken on the email problem with as much relish as Atos, a global IT services company based outside of Paris, with 74,000 employees.

或许没有哪家公司会像源讯公司(Atos)这样对电子邮件问题如此感兴趣。源讯公司是一家全球IT服务提供商，总部位于巴黎市郊，拥有7.4万名员工。

After an internal study found that workers spent some two hours a day managing their inboxes, the company vowed to phase out internal email entirely.

在一次内部调查中，源讯公司发现，员工每天要花费大约两个小时来处理邮件。此后，该公司决定逐步将内部邮件完全取消。

Workers can still use email with outside customers, but managers have directed workers to communicate with colleagues via an internal social network, which the company began installing earlier this fall, says Robert Shaw, global program director for the 'Zero Email' initiative.

该公司负责“零电子邮件项目的全球项目主管罗伯特·肖(Robert Shaw)表示，员工们仍然可以使用电子邮件与外部客户联络，不过管理层要求员工通过公司内部的社交网络来进行员工之间的交流，今年秋天公司开始安装了这一内部社交网络。

Atos says it's too early to say whether the experiment is a success, but in an anti-email manifesto posted on the company's website, CEO Thierry Breton compares his company's efforts to reduce digital clutter to 'measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.'

源讯公司称，现在就这次试行做法是否成功做出评价为时尚早，不过在该公司网站上公布的一则反对电子邮件的声明中，公司首席执行长蒂埃里·布雷顿(Thierry Breton)将他们公司这一减少电子干扰的努力比作“工业革命之后所采取的减少环境污染的措施。

Office workers aren't the only ones struggling to stay on-task.

办公室职员并不是唯一一群需要为专心工作而苦苦挣扎的人。

At Robins Air Force Base, in Georgia, fewer than half of planes were being repaired on time by the Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex because employees were working on too many planes at once and toggling between too many tasks on each.

在位于佐治亚州的罗宾斯空军基地(Robins Air Force Base)，华纳罗宾斯空军后勤综合大楼(Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex)里只有不到半数的飞机可以按时得到维修，因为工作人员一次需要修缮的飞机数量太多，每一次需要应对的任务太繁复了。

The base worked with Realization, a San Jose, Calif., project-management consulting and software firm, to reduce the number of aircraft in work in the maintenance docks. For example, with one type of aircraft, they reduced the average number in work to six from 11.

该基地与总部位于加利福尼亚州圣何塞(San Jose)的工程管理咨询与软件公司Realization合作，减少了维修基地内接受维修的飞机数量。举例来说，他们将其中一类飞机在同一时间内接受维修的数量从原先的平均11架减少到了六架。

Fewer projects led to better focus and more on-time results. A year after changing workflow, 97% of the aircraft are now repaired on time, says Doug Keene, vice director of the air-logistics complex.

项目数量减少的结果是更专注的工作、以及更多任务的按时完成。负责空军基地后勤综合大楼的道格·基恩(Doug Keene)表示，在改变工作流程一年后，如今97%的飞机都能够按时完成维修了。

Businesses have praised workers for multitasking, 'but that isn't necessarily a good thing,' says Mr. Keene. 'When you are focused on just a few things, you tend to solve problems faster. You can't disguise the problem by looking like you're really busy.'

基恩说，企业一直赞赏员工能够同时承担多项任务，“但这不一定是件好事。而当你仅仅专注于几件事时，你往往能够更快地解决问题。你无法通过假装看上去真的很忙的办法来将问题隐瞒起来。