Editor’s note: this is the second in a multi-part series from Stewart Mader, author of Wikipatterns. You can check out some of his other work a Grow Your Wiki, and his first post on the wikinomics site is here.

In Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast, New York Times writer Matt Richtel looks at the growing problem of fractured attention in the workplace – thanks to email, instant messaging, and other interruptions that are costing employees 28% of a typical workday – and the cost isn’t just measured in time:

In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions, predominately mundane matters, according to Basex. The firm says that a big chunk of that cost comes from the time it takes people to recover from an interruption and get back to work.

I often talk about email as a “push” medium – that is, you push messages out to recipients, and each person gets their own copy. This seems simple enough, but two problems emerge in practice. Each new email message can be an interruption, and the fact that a separate copy goes to each person means that it isolates people from each other.

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