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The cost of interrupted work (2023)

(blog.oberien.de)
282 points _vaporwave_ | 2 comments | 23 Aug 25 21:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.642s | source
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didibus ◴[24 Aug 25 00:44 UTC] No.45000291[source]▶
I think the original source is a 2006 Gallup interview with the researcher Gloria Mark you can read here: https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/23146/too-many-inter...

> GMJ: How long does it take to get back to work after an interruption?

> Mark: There's good news and bad news. To have a uniform comparison, we looked at all work that was interrupted and resumed on the same day. The good news is that most interrupted work was resumed on the same day -- 81.9 percent -- and it was resumed, on average, in 23 minutes and 15 seconds, which I guess is not so long.

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1. 6LLvveMx2koXfwn ◴[24 Aug 25 00:57 UTC] No.45000333[source]▶
What was the bad news?
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2. didibus ◴[24 Aug 25 01:03 UTC] No.45000369[source]▶
The full interview is all in the link. But specifically the bad news was:

> But the bad news is, when you're interrupted, you don't immediately go back to the task you were doing before you were interrupted. There are about two intervening tasks before you go back to your original task, so it takes more effort to reorient back to the original task. Also, interruptions change the physical environment. For example, someone has asked you for information and you have opened new windows on your desktop, or people have given you papers that are now arranged on your desk. So often the physical layout of your environment has changed, and it's harder to reconstruct where you were. So there's a cognitive cost to an interruption.

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