Why fragmented time produces nothing, and how to defend a block of it.
You sit down at 9am for the report block you planned on Sunday and defended on Tuesday. Twelve minutes in, a ping. You answer it — forty seconds, barely an interruption. Back to the document. Where were you? What was that sentence going to say? Another few minutes to rebuild the thought, and… ping.
By 11am the block is over. Two hours were spent. About twenty productive minutes happened. The maths of that morning is the subject of this lesson.
Interruptions are not the size they look
A forty-second ping does not cost forty seconds. Researchers who study interrupted work keep finding the same thing: after switching away, it takes people on the order of twenty minutes to fully return to where they were in a demanding task. The reply was quick. The recovery was not.
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