Have we gone overboard with the social workplace?

I’m a big believer in teamwork and togetherness when it comes to workplace productivity and even macroeconomic policy.

But some recent books and columns have me thinking our society, and our businesses, may be paying too little attention to the importance of solitude.

Yes, Twitter, Facebook and the like can be useful tools for collaborating and communicating. Companies are tapping such social networking technologies in intriguing ways. Retailer The Gap, for example, had employees post videos about their philanthropy projects online, where workers and the public voted on the most worthy one.

But there’s a cost to too much Twittering and YouTubing. New York Times columnist John Tierney recently interviewed Winifred Gallagher, author of the new book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life.

Gallagher suggests starting the workday with a laser-like focus on your most important task for 90 minutes. It can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption, Tierney writes.

“Multitasking is a myth,” Gallagher tells Tierney. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: It’s either this or it’s that.”

David Brooks’ recent New York Times column about genius makes a related point: Excellence takes a ton of focused effort.

“The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess,” Brooks writes. “Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.”

In his book Outliers last year, author Malcolm Gladwell helped popularize a key threshold: 10,000 hours of practice appear to be needed to achieve world-class expertise.

It’s too much to think all employees will produce on the level of Mozart or Tiger Woods if they just have more practice time in their cubicles. And a key to deliberate practice is an outside eye that can correct errors and offer suggestions.

Still, it stands to reason that time for focused work will boost skills and therefore productivity.

There’s a balance to be found here. My cubicle in a small, quiet office in San Francisco lacks the energetic pulse of bustling newsrooms, which helped propel my work at previous jobs. But my writing now benefits from minimal office distractions—a state I’ve sought to preserve online by severely limiting my use of Twitter and Facebook.

Amid the all the interactivity of instant messages, Tweets and e-mail alerts, employees—and ultimately employers—can benefit from quality quiet alone time.