Epilogue

Once you arrived at this page, your reading will have been interrupted a number of times: a text message diverted your attention but you resumed your reading; a call caught you by surprise because you forgot to mute your phone; colleagues, friends or family members sought your attention, help or advice; you joined a meeting, coffee or lunch break – and resumed your reading. A thought crossed your mind and you jotted it down, or you had to look something up and returned to the now less obscure passage – suddenly you remembered something urgent: a rehearsal, a court hearing, a revolution. Suddenly it was time.

Most likely you did not read through this issue of Performance Research in a continuous and linear fashion: you skipped some articles, glimpsed into others, stopped and returned, resumed where you had left off – you jumped back and forth, interrupted your reading a number of times just in order to return to it; sometimes after a caffeine, nicotine or some other narcotic or even psychedelic break, after a nap or slumber, after love making or a quarrel, after meditating – you had to do your daily workout, say your prayers, practise your instrument. You checked mails in between, commented and clicked likes on your preferred social network – but you returned – after catching or missing your bus, train or plane and finally found a seat – your seat – to open up that same page that you had to close when you were interrupted by a rain shower or a teardrop, because a glass of wine or a cup of tea got spilled and now you had to dry it and – you resumed your reading. Suddenly a stranger appeared.

Whatever kind of interruptions you had to face – and as long as you came back to reading this issue after each kind of secondary task – your reading performance was merely interrupted. Had you not resumed your reading, this would not have been a temporary interruption, of course, but a final rupture. And as long as you did not get involved in some kind of secondary task, then you were just distracted, not interrupted – at least according to the definitions provided by Interruption Science.¹ In either case, the time it took you each time to return from any of your secondary tasks or distractions to the primary task of reading this issue is known as the resumption lag.² Sometimes it was just a few seconds, sometimes minutes, even hours and days, possibly even weeks and months, even years until you got back to the line, paragraph, page or section where you left off – until you arrived here, at this epilogue, after numerous interruptions, even interrupting your interruptions.

But maybe reading this issue has not been your primary task in the first place, but rather something secondary and a welcome pretext for distraction. Curiosity paired with escapism. You easily resumed your primary task after a short resumption lag. You managed to divert your attention back from the interruptions gathered in this volume and returned to whatever it was you had to do. But once again you interrupted yourself and resumed your reading – otherwise you would not be here now.

Maybe you even interrupted your reading of this issue in order to jump to this epilogue. For sure, however, you did not read this issue or even this short epilogue from the beginning to the end without any interruption. But if your attention came or would come back to this issue, possibly even to this dash – either as a primary or secondary task – then you actually experienced interruptions, not merely a distraction. In this case, we, the editors and contributors, would have accomplished our job – of turning this issue of Performance Research into some interruptions on the notion of interruption, as conceived in an era of epic interruption – or so it seems.

When reading this published issue, we hope to find ourselves, as it were, already in some kind of global resumption lag. Yet, in the final phase of editing we asked ourselves: What would be our primary task to return to after this pandemic? And is there a task to ‘return’ to, now that irreversible damage has been done to our planet? Can we ever return to what has been before? Certainly not. Here ends the notion of interruption and begins that of rupture. Thus, our hope includes that you could be willing to leave behind whatever it is you deem important in order to address the most pertinent issues of our times – if you aren’t already. And you know what these are: We’re lagging behind. It’s time to interrupt your reading once again. Think. Though, this might not be an interruption, but a rupture, the end. So why should we continue to research performance? What will persist – apart from an imperative to act?

There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation. Franz Kafka (2006: §26)

Interrupted Reading’ by Camille Coro, 1870. Source: Wikiart https://bit.ly/3HSBMS5

Notes

1 ‘Interruption science is the interdisciplinary scientific study concerned with how interruptions affect human performance, and the development of interventions to ameliorate the disruption caused by interruptions. Interruption science is a branch of human factors psychology and emerged from human– computer interaction and cognitive psychology’ (https://bit.ly/3CAEIRE, accessed 18 November 2021).

2 ‘[T]he time it takes to resume after an interruption, the resumption lag, is a good measure of interruption disruptiveness’ (Gould et al. 2013: 149).