Interrupted Work Costs $588 Billion a Year

Any interruption introduces a change in work, since people that are constantly interrupted develop a mode of working faster (and writing less) to compensate for the time they know they will lose by being interrupted. Those conclusions come from Mark G. (2008), her studies to identify extension of interruptions and how affect tasks, recovery of tasks after interruptions, and timing of interruptions.

After only 20 minutes of interrupted performance people reported significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort, and pressure.

There’s good news and bad news (the study 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).

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.

Balance all of that on top of the financial cost (estimated at $588 billions every year nationwide) and you can see we, as a workforce have a serious problem with interruptions.

Yet working faster with interruptions has its cost: people in these conditions experienced a higher workload, more stress, higher frustration, more time pressure, and more effort. So … interrupted work may be done faster but at a price!

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Gloria Mark (2008). The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress. http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/chi08-mark.pdf