Spring Ahead or Fall Back? Exploring the Nature of Resumption Errors

Abstract

It has long been known that interruptions can be disruptive, but the details on where people resume an interrupted task have been largely overlooked by the literature. This paper describes an exploratory study to understand where people resume a task following an interruption. The findings suggest that people are significantly more likely to commit an error on the first step immediately following an interruption than on non-interrupted steps. Furthermore, people seem more likely to repeat a step than skip a step during these resumption errors. Finally, this trend toward repeating steps disappears in errors of non-interrupted steps.