Every interruption costs the minutes you spend on it, plus the minutes it takes to get back into the work. Add both up and the number gets uncomfortable quickly.
Eight interruptions a day, two minutes to deal with each and ten minutes to get back into what you were doing, adds up to about 1 h 36 min of lost focus every day. Over a working year that is roughly 46 full workdays.
The handling time is the part you notice. The refocus time is the part you do not — and it is usually the bigger one. Enter your own numbers below.
2 minutes to handle each, 10 minutes to get back in, 5 workdays a week, 46 weeks a year.
| Interruptions | Lost per day | Per week | Workdays a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 a day | 36 min | 3 h | 17.3 |
| 5 a day | 1 h | 5 h | 28.8 |
| 8 a day | 1 h 36 min | 8 h | 46 |
| 12 a day | 2 h 24 min | 12 h | 69 |
| 20 a day | 4 h | 20 h | 115 |
Answering a quick question takes two minutes. Getting back to where you were takes longer: you have to rebuild what you were holding in your head, find your place, and push through the urge to check one more thing while you are already distracted. Researchers call the leftover pull of the previous task attention residue.
How long that takes varies enormously with the work. A figure of around 23 minutes, from research by Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine, is widely quoted. The calculator defaults to a more conservative 10 minutes — change it to whatever matches your experience.
A large share of interruptions are self-inflicted: checking a phone, glancing at email, opening a new tab "just for a second". They cost exactly the same refocus time as a colleague at your desk, and they are the ones you can remove most easily.
Count both when you fill in the number. If you are honest, it will probably be higher than you expected.
Batch the interruptions you cannot avoid. Checking messages at fixed times instead of continuously turns forty small refocus costs into three. Make focus blocks visible to others — a status, a closed door, a calendar block — so the interruptions that remain land between blocks instead of inside them.
And when you are interrupted mid-task, write one line about what you were about to do before you switch. It cuts the refocus time more than almost anything else.
It varies with the task, from a few minutes for simple work to much longer for complex problems. A figure of about 23 minutes from research at UC Irvine is often quoted; many people find 10 to 15 minutes closer to their experience.
With eight interruptions a day, two minutes to handle each and ten minutes to refocus, about 1 hour 36 minutes. More interruptions or a longer refocus time quickly push that past two hours.
The part of your attention that stays stuck on a previous task after you switch away from it. It is why you feel slower and scattered for a while after an interruption, even once you are back on task.