Most workplaces are built around availability: chat that expects a fast reply, meetings scattered through the day, an inbox that refills by the minute. Trying to concentrate inside that system on willpower alone is like trying to read on a moving train. It helps to understand what interruptions actually cost, because the popular version of the story is partly wrong.
In a 2008 lab experiment presented at the CHI conference, Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke had 48 mostly university-age participants work through emails in a simulated office job. Some were interrupted every two minutes by a phone call or instant message; others weren't.
Surprisingly, the interrupted participants finished their emails faster, once the time spent handling the interruptions was subtracted (about 20.3 to 20.6 minutes versus 22.8 for the uninterrupted condition), with no drop in errors or politeness. But they paid for it: they reported significantly more stress, frustration, time pressure and effort. The authors' interpretation was that people speed up to compensate for the time they expect to lose, and that this compensation has a cost.
The finding that survives fact-checking is arguably more useful: a major cost of frequent interruptions may be strain (stress, frustration and effort) rather than minutes lost on a stopwatch. That matters for the quality of your day and for how sustainable your pace is.
Organizational psychologist Sophie Leroy described a related problem in a 2009 paper in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. In two experiments she found that people who switch away from an unfinished task struggle to fully transition their attention. Part of the mind stays with the old task, which she called attention residue, and performance on the next task suffers.
The encouraging part comes from later work by Leroy and Theresa Glomb, published in Organization Science in 2018. In four studies, people who took about a minute to write a "ready-to-resume" plan for an interrupted task (where they left off, what was still to do, and what they were postponing) showed less attention residue and performed better on the task that interrupted them. Nothing gets finished; you simply close the loop on paper so your mind can let go.
Before email or chat, write the single most important outcome for the day and the first action toward it. Once the inbox is open, other people's priorities set the agenda.
Treat a focus block like a meeting with yourself: named, visible and protected. Cluster real meetings together where you can, so they don't slice the day into unusable 40-minute fragments. Our guide to Pomodoro vs time blocking shows how the two fit together.
A 25-minute Pomodoro, or a longer rhythm such as 52/17, turns "I'm busy" into something concrete and time-limited. A running countdown also makes a polite boundary easy: "I'm free at 2:30."
Pick three or four fixed times to check messages, and turn off badges and pop-ups in between. If your role genuinely needs real-time responses (support, on-call), adapt this: check more often, but still protect at least one uninterrupted block.
Sixty seconds, three lines: where you are, the next action, and what you're parking. It's the one tactic on this list backed directly by experimental evidence.
A status message ("Focusing until 11:00, back then"), a team habit of using chat threads for non-urgent questions, and headphones as a visual signal all lower the social cost of saying "not now."
Lyrics tend to hurt reading and writing; steady non-lyrical sound is worth testing; silence is fine. See what the research says about white noise, music and ambient sound.
A widely quoted 2017 study claimed that the mere presence of your smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. A pre-registered direct replication published in 2022 did not find the effect. So treat "phone in another room" as a cheap experiment, not proven science. Actual notifications are a separate problem from a phone sitting on the desk: they're interruptions.
Most people have a stretch when hard thinking comes more easily. Put demanding work there and save email and admin for the slumps. Our guide to a morning routine for deep work is one way to set that up.
Say them warmly and follow through. The boundary only works if people learn that you really do come back.
| Time | Block | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 9:00–9:15 | Plan | Choose one priority and write the first action |
| 9:15–10:45 | Deep work | Three 25-minute Pomodoros with short breaks |
| 10:45–11:15 | Messages, batch 1 | Email and chat, all in one go |
| 11:15–12:30 | Meetings and collaboration | Cluster them here where possible |
| 12:30–13:30 | Lunch | Away from the screen |
| 13:30–14:00 | Messages, batch 2 | |
| 14:00–15:30 | Second focus block | Two 52/17 sprints or three Pomodoros |
| 15:30–16:00 | Admin, batch 3 | Low-energy tasks |
| 16:00–16:15 | Wrap up | Ready-to-resume notes and tomorrow's priority |
This is a template, not a prescription. Adjust it to the real constraints of your role.
Not everyone can block out three hours. If you manage a team, work in support, or sit in an open-plan office, shrink the unit: one Pomodoro is a real focus block. Two or three of them, placed where your day is naturally quieter (early morning, lunchtime, after most people leave), add up. Then make the case for change with evidence rather than frustration: track your uninterrupted stretches for a week and share the pattern with your team or manager.
Ready to try it? Start a free timer, no sign-up needed, and for the wider picture on attention read how to concentrate better.
Plan for interruptions instead of fighting them. Write a 60-second ready-to-resume note when you're pulled away, check messages at fixed times, use a status message to signal focus time, and shrink your focus unit to a single 25-minute Pomodoro if long blocks aren't possible.
There is no universal number. The Pomodoro Technique uses 25 minutes, and observational data from the time-tracking company DeskTime found its most productive users worked in sprints of about 52 minutes in 2014, with later figures varying. A 2025 controlled study found no clear winner between break techniques, so use whatever rhythm you can sustain. See our 52/17 guide and Flowtime vs Pomodoro.
It depends on the task. In controlled studies, music with lyrics impaired reading comprehension, while instrumental music and steady non-lyrical sound did not. For repetitive tasks the evidence is mixed. Read our review of the research and test it on your own work.
Structure and external cues tend to help: timed work blocks, visible timers, written next actions and fewer switching points. This is general information, not medical advice; talk to your clinician about what suits you. Our Pomodoro guide for ADHD covers practical strategies.
There is no evidence that either setting is universally better. Home can mean fewer interruptions but different distractions, and the same principles apply in both: protect blocks, batch communication and use a visible timer. See our guide to Pomodoro for remote workers.
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