The 23-Minute Recovery
Each interruption costs about 23 minutes of refocusing, and many are questions a document already answers. Send those questions to a system instead of a colleague, and the time comes back.
Each interruption at work costs about 23 minutes of refocusing. Many are questions a document already answers, and those can go to a system instead of a colleague.
A colleague asks where the current fee schedule is. You answer in thirty seconds and turn back to the reconciliation you were halfway through, but getting back to the same depth of focus takes about twenty-three minutes more.
Where the 23 Minutes Comes From
Gloria Mark spent years observing office workers at UC Irvine, and the figure she is best known for is this: after a single interruption it takes about 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the original task at the same depth of focus. She reports it in her book Attention Span (2023) and in interviews. The number is hers rather than a line in a particular paper, so treat it as the finding of a career of fieldwork rather than a citation you can look up in a table.
Her data adds the part people forget: after an interruption, people pass through roughly two other tasks before they return to the one they left. The interruption is short; the climb back is long, and the person who was interrupted pays for it.
What It Adds Up To
Picture a day split by where the hours land:
Illustrative: one eight-hour day. The shares show the argument; they are not a measurement.
On that split, recovery takes 22% of an eight-hour day, or 1.76 hours. Over 250 working days that is 440 hours a year: eleven 40-hour weeks spent climbing back to focus.
Which Interruptions Can Go
Many interruptions are requests for information: where is this, what is the process for that, what is our policy on the other. Their answers already sit in a policy, a procedure or a shared drive, and they never needed a person.
'Where is the current fee schedule?' interrupts a senior accountant. 'What is our refund window for enterprise clients?' interrupts client service. 'Who is covering the office this week?' interrupts the team lead. 'How do I expense a client lunch?' interrupts finance. Each starts someone's 23-minute climb back, and none needed a person.
The same questions go to a system that answers from your own documents, with the source it used, at 2 a.m. or in the middle of someone's focus time. Nobody is interrupted, and nobody's climb back starts.
The rest should still reach a person: mentoring, judgment calls, work two people need to think through together. That is the valuable kind of interruption, and the aim is to route each question to the right place.
One Day, Two Ways
Take someone interrupted eleven times a day.
Routing the Questions
The fix is a routing decision: which questions go to a system, and which to a person.
A question comes up
Someone needs information to move forward
Is it written down?
Could a policy, procedure or document answer it?
Yes: ask the system
An answer with its source, and nobody interrupted
No: ask a person
For judgment, advice and work done together
Start by keeping a tally for a week: who was asked what, and whether a document already had the answer. Those documents go behind a system first, and answers that exist only in someone’s head get written down. The risk is a system answering from an out-of-date document, so every document it draws on needs an owner. AskBase, our engine for this, is available now: it answers from your own documents in Slack and a web app, scoped to who is asking, and says what it searched when it finds nothing.
How many 23-minute recoveries is your team losing each day?
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