The problem with interruptions is that it takes 25 minutes and 26 seconds on average to get back on track. “Yet, results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers.” “eople need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another,” Researcher Sophie Leroy wrote. This is due to a phenomenon called “ attention residue.” Research shows that when you switch tasks it takes a long time to get back to the level of efficiency you were at before you were interrupted. Even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40% of your productive time. Not only are distractions frequent, but they kill productivity. Why distractions are so deadly to productivity Other studies show that office workers are interrupted about seven times an hour, which adds up to 56 interruptions a day, 80% of which are considered trivial. A recent study found that a typical employee only has 11 minutes between distractions. Work from Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine has shown that workers typically attend to a task for about three minutes before switching to something else (usually an electronic communication).

Social media takes up 44 minutes of the average worker’s day.Īnd then when we do start doing real work, we’re rarely able to concentrate.

The average worker spends 1 hour and 5 minutes of their workday reading news sites.

Slack’s average user sends 200 messages every day.

53% of employees waste at least one hour every day dealing with distractions.The average employee wastes up to 41% of their time at work on low-value tasks.In fact, researchers have extensively studied the topic. It won’t shock most of us to learn that today’s knowledge workers are notoriously distracted. Focus Time is high-leverage How we spend our work timeĪt Clockwise, we’ve optimized calendars for thousands of workers at hundreds of companies - from Spotify to Slack - which puts us in a unique position to understand how people are spending their work time.

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