Interruptions and focused work: what the evidence tells us

Interruptions can change how people work and where their attention remains. Their effects need to be assessed against a specific measure: speed, errors, perceived strain or performance on another task. A single number for “lost productivity” cannot stand in for all of them.

This matters when deciding how to organise demanding work. You need to understand what a study measured before translating its finding into a change to your day.

Different questions need different measures

An interruption is an event. What follows it can be measured in several ways.

Time until somebody returns to a task includes whatever they do in between. Time needed to resume once back at the task is a different question. Performance might mean accuracy, speed or the quality of a decision. A report of frustration is another kind of evidence again.

Attention residue concerns thoughts about previous work carrying into a subsequent activity. It should not be used as a catch-all label for every distraction or every period away from a task.

The distinctions below help explain why research findings can appear to disagree when they are answering different questions.

What the selected evidence shows

Finishing faster can coexist with greater strain

In the 2008 email-task experiment, the authors reported no significant differences in measured errors or politeness across interruption conditions. Participants nevertheless reported greater stress and frustration when interrupted. The study challenges the assumption that every cost must appear as slower work. Its results do not establish a long-term productivity benefit from interruptions. Read the paper.

Unfinished work can affect the task you switch to

Leroy and Glomb examined a direction that is easy to overlook: attention to the task causing the interruption. Their abstract reports that concern about returning to unfinished work under time pressure can interfere with that new task. Briefly planning the return reduced the reported effect. This finding concerns a particular transition and condition, rather than a universal recovery interval. Read the publisher abstract.

Remembering work and wanting to resume it are distinct

The 2025 meta-analysis examined 59 publications using interrupted-task approaches. Its distinction between recall and resumption is useful: wanting to return does not establish that every unfinished task is remembered better. This is not a direct test of workplace attention residue, so it neither proves nor disproves every claim about that separate phenomenon. Read the meta-analysis.

What this means for your working week

The following are practical interpretations, not interventions tested by FlowQuota.

First, judge a working arrangement by more than whether something got finished. Ask how the work felt, what had to be deferred and whether the arrangement remains workable.

Second, consider the transition itself. If you must switch, a short note about the unfinished question and your next action gives you a concrete place to return. Do not turn that suggestion into a promise of a particular performance gain.

Third, distinguish avoidable interruptions from necessary collaboration. A colleague's question might resolve an important dependency. The useful decision is when and how to handle it, with the demands of both pieces of work in view.

For example, if preparing a client recommendation keeps giving way to urgent questions, investigate the pattern. Are the questions essential? Could someone provide cover? Was the input to the recommendation ready? The answer may require a change in working arrangements rather than greater personal effort.

What this review does not establish

These sources do not supply a universal number of minutes lost per interruption, an ideal session length or a measured benefit from using FlowQuota. They use different tasks, populations and outcomes. Their results should not be combined into a single performance estimate.

FlowQuota can provide a record of deliberate Focus and surrounding calendar context. It does not observe attention residue directly. The distinction matters: evidence about your working pattern can support a decision without explaining every cognitive mechanism behind it.

How this review was prepared

This is a selective narrative review prepared on 19 September 2026. Targeted web searches used the titles and authors of the interrupted-work and attention-residue studies, followed by searches for the recall/resumption meta-analysis. Sources were accessed through an author-hosted university PDF, the INFORMS publisher page and the journal's open-access article.

We selected these sources because they examine different outcomes and discourage a single, overly simple account of interruption costs. The 2008 paper and 2025 meta-analysis were available in full text; the 2018 study was assessed only from its publisher abstract. Detailed effect sizes and unverified participant characteristics from that study are therefore omitted.

This was not an exhaustive database search or an independently duplicated evidence review. We did not pool results, assess every subsequent replication or conduct an original study. Source access and selection limit the scope. The selection is intended to clarify concepts, not settle the entire field.

References

1. Mark, G., Gudith, D., and Klocke, U. (2008). The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress. CHI 2008. DOI: 10.1145/1357054.1357072.
2. Leroy, S., and Glomb, T. M. (2018). Tasks Interrupted. Organization Science, 29(3), 380–397. DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2017.1184. Publisher abstract consulted.
3. Ghibellini, R., and Meier, B. (2025). Interruption, recall and resumption: a meta-analysis of the Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina effects. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, 962. DOI: 10.1057/s41599-025-05000-w.

To apply these questions to your schedule, read How to make time for focused work in a meeting-heavy week.