A recent study shows that even a three-second distraction can cause a colossal mistake in your work.
An experiment was done in which participants were asked to perform tasks, with or without interruptions. It only took a 2.8-second interruption to cause participants to make a mistake. This is because “the participants had to shift their attention from one task to another. Even momentary interruptions can seem jarring when they occur during a process that takes considerable thought,” says lead researcher Erik Altman.
“What this means is that our health and safety is, on some level, contingent on whether the people looking after it have been interrupted,” Altman said. ” … ensuing errors can be disastrous for professionals such as airplane mechanics and emergency room doctors.”
If you know TapRooT®, you already know how detrimental distractions can be. It comes down to the root cause “Human Engineering”. Make your work environment the safest you possibly can by turning off your cell phone and focusing of the task at hand. Take breaks when necessary and make sure you’re well rested and can complete your job in a safe manner.
If your job is to respond to crises, then by all means keep your cell phone on, but evaluate your unnecessary distractions and see if you can eliminate any.
Don’t have a high risk job? This also applies to your desk job. Turn off your cell phone and e-mail for the period of time when you really need to focus and get a certain task performed perfectly. Then check them at a designated time.
(Image from The Houston Chronicle)
Category: Career Development Tips, Root Cause Analysis Tips
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In the aviation maintenance world, Human Factors training spends a lot of time on the subject of distraction, which counts as one of the “Dirty Dozen” factors contributing to errors and non-conformance. I’ll never forget a story I read very early in my career as a certificated Aviation Maintenance Technician. An Australian mechanic working on an airplane operated by a missionary organization was very briefly distracted during enigne work. He returned to the task and soon signed off the work. During the next flight that same day, a fuel leak caused a fiery crash with the loss of all souls on board. It was only upon hearing of the tragedy that he recalled he did not finish tightening/torquing a fuel line nut…after being inturrupted. He never touched another airplane by choice.
Comment by Mike M @ SWA — January 31, 2013 @ 4:52 pm