How Long Does It Take to Get Back to Your Original Task?

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40% of productive time at work is spent multitasking. 70% of all emails received were open within six seconds of their receipt. When you check an email, it takes an average of 64 seconds to resume an original task. Another study found that when an email involves doing something outside your inbox, it takes over nine minutes to return to your original task.

Every 40 seconds, our attention breaks. It takes an act of extreme self-awareness to even notice. That’s why Gloria Mark, a professor in the Department of Informatics at University of California, Irvine, started measuring the attention spans of office workers with scientific precision. What she has discovered is not simply an explosion of disruptive communications, but a pandemic of stress that has followed workers from their offices to their homes. She shares the latest findings from the “science of interruptions,” and how we can stop forfeiting our attention to the next notification, and the next one, ad nauseam.