We are really excited to announce the acceptance of a grant from DIZH, the digitalization initiative of the Zurich higher education institution. The rapid action grant aims to have rapid impact on the economy and/or society of the greater Zurich area and elsewhere. Since our successful study a few years back, we have been looking for opportunities to allow professionals and companies to obtain and use the FlowLight, given the frequent requests that we still receive to date. The DIZH’s call for having rapid impact and the pandemic-enforced shifts to a more hybrid workplace scenarios are the perfect opportunity to make the FlowLight available to the greater public. We are very much looking forward to this project.

Project Summary:

In today’s collaborative work environments, knowledge workers experience frequent interruptions from their co-workers, either in-person at the office or through online channels, such as email, chat and video calls. In our previous work, we’ve studied interruptions and their impact on productivity, and developed a research prototype, the FlowLight, which combines a physical traffic-light like LED with an automatic interruptibility measure based on computer interaction data. A large-scale and long-term field study showed, amongst other results, that it reduced 46% of interruptions at work, and workers’ awareness about the disruptiveness and cost of interruptions at work. The recent trends towards hybrid workplace scenarios induced further challenges on workers to find a balance between focused deep work and collaboration. We are now aiming to adapt the FlowLight to today’s hybrid workplace scenarios and make it available to the public. To that purpose we are looking for implementation and study partners.