The focus blog: interruptions, deep work and staying unavailable
Most writing about interruptions repeats one misquoted number and stops there. This does the opposite: every figure below is traced to the study it came from, including the ones that are more complicated than they first look — and the ones that turn out to be less certain than everyone assumes.
On your screen
Real people, licensed stock footage, no AI.
There is a specific number that appears in almost every article about workplace interruptions. It is almost always quoted the same way, and it is almost always quoted wrong — including by the researcher it is attributed to. Getting that right is the reason this blog exists, and it shapes everything else here: prefer the primary source over the summary of the summary, and say when the evidence is weaker than it sounds.
What this blog is for
- Sources over slogans. Every number is attributed to a named study, with the year. Where a widely repeated figure turns out to be misreported, that is the article.
- Interruption is a social problem. The most important interruptions are not notifications. They are people deciding, from three metres away, whether you are available.
- Honest about uncertainty. The evidence on background music is genuinely mixed and we say so rather than picking the convenient study.
- Unclear evidence gets flagged. The 23-minute refocus figure is real and widely misread. Here is what actually happened.
How we research
The interruption literature is a good example of how numbers travel. A figure published in an interview gets cited in a trade article, then in a vendor blog post, then in a book, and by the time it reaches you it has usually acquired a meaning it never had. The 23-minute refocus statistic is the clearest case: it comes from a 2006 interview, the peer-reviewed paper behind the same research reports a slightly different number, and the well-known 2008 laboratory study does not contain it at all. All three are real findings about different things.
None of that makes the research bad. It makes citation careless. So the rule here is simple: if a number appears on this blog, you can follow it to the study it came from, with the year attached. Where a widely repeated figure turns out to be misread, that becomes an article rather than a footnote — see why your colleagues keep interrupting you.
The same rule applies in the other direction. Where the evidence is genuinely mixed, we say it is mixed instead of picking the study that suits the argument. The research on background music and concentration, for instance, genuinely does not settle: a systematic review of 95 articles finds a general negative effect on memory and language tasks, while other work finds no meaningful impact on sustained attention, and the honest summary is that it depends on the task, the volume and the person. The café and coworking article reflects that uncertainty rather than hiding it.
The articles
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Why your colleagues keep interrupting you
The real numbers behind workplace interruptions, the myth of the 23-minute refocus, and what attention residue does to the task you switch to next.
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How to stay focused in cafés and coworking spaces
A café solves the noise problem and creates a social one. What the acoustics research actually shows, and why headphones do not help.
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Setting workplace boundaries without being rude
A ladder of interventions from weakest to strongest, what to actually say when you get interrupted anyway, and an honest look at the ethics.
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How to look busy at work (without lying about anything)
What the existing tools in this category do, where they fall short, and why showing real people instead of AI is the only version of this that holds up.
Start with the short version
If you would rather not read four articles before deciding whether this is worth your time, the summary is on one page: a productivity tool to avoid distractions and interruptions. It covers what the research says, how a simulated meeting changes the social calculation, and what it costs, which is nothing.
Research cited across this blog: Gloria Mark, University of California, Irvine (Gallup Business Journal, 2006; CHI 2005 and CHI 2008); Sophie Leroy, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 109(2), 2009; Banbury & Berry, British Journal of Psychology 89(3), 1998; Radius Global Market Research for Interface, 2018 (n = 2,014); James, Delfabbro & King, 2021; Cal Newport, Deep Work, 2016.