Interruptions cost 23 minutes 15 seconds, right?

Summary

Interruptions cost 23 minutes 15 seconds, right? 2023-11-05 You’ve likely read lots of blog posts stating that it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to work after an interruption, context switch, or meeting. Thus, “do you have five minutes” ends up not only costing those few minutes, but instead about half an hour. But where does that number come from? I just wanted to quickly reference this fact to a colleague. Quick search for the reference, copy’n’paste it, in and out, 20 minutes adventure. I quickly found a reference to a paper. For sanity sake, I just wanted to verify where it states the 23 minutes. Open the paper, Ctrl+F for “23”, “no results”. Huh? Papers Most of the posts mentioning the number refer to the paper The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress. The authors performed a study investigating different effects of interruptions during long tasks. Contrary to the quoted number, the study found out that the time spent on only the original task was in fact lower when interruptions were present (20.31 and 20.60 min) compared to no interruptions (22.77 min), albeit with much higher experienced stress. The paper never goes into details regarding the recovery time between finishing the interruption and getting back to the original task. The paper never mentions the number 23. Maybe it’s in a different paper? Related Work? References? Blog Posts The search continued. In addition to the 5 papers I (fittingly) read through a total of 23 posts. 9 posts incorrectly referred to one of the papers; one of them even included a quote that is nowhere to be found within the referenced paper 2 posts correctly referred to the first paper for its actual results 9 posts directly or indirectly refer to three interviews with Gloria Mark (the author of the original paper), in which she stated the 23 minutes and 15 seconds recovery time 2 posts refer to the Wall Street Journal, which directly quotes Gloria Mark with the 23 minutes 15 seconds figure So in the end...