That`s according to Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine. She has found it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to the original task after an interruption.
In short, that 30 second distraction isn’t a distraction, it’s a large amount of your day.
Mark also says that these distractions don’t just hurt productivity, they also affect our well-being.
She wrote in the New York Times:
Our research has shown that attention distraction can lead to higher stress, a bad mood and lower productivity
And if you think you’re the exception, that you don’t get distracted and can multitask, you’re wrong.
Studies show that focusing on a single tasks is the most effective way of getting work done and that distraction inhibit workers across the board.
In short, if you want to work productively, focus on the task in hand and eliminate distractions wherever possible.
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