A productivity tool to avoid distractions and interruptions

If interruptions were a technical problem, you would have solved them already. You have muted notifications, closed Slack and told people not to disturb you. It still does not work, because an interruption is not a notification — it is a person walking to your desk and deciding whether to speak to you. That decision is social, and it is made from what they can see.

This is the gap a productivity tool to avoid distractions and interruptions has to close. Every existing fix targets the digital layer, where the problem is much smaller. MeetingSimulator targets the social layer: it changes what is visible on your screen, so the decision never gets made. It is free, it runs in the browser, and it requires no account and no installation.

What interruptions really cost

The most quoted interruption statistic in business writing is that it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to an interrupted task. It is worth being precise about where that number comes from, because it is widely misreported — including by the researcher herself in later interviews.

The figure comes from Gloria Mark's observational work at the University of California, Irvine. In the 2006 Gallup interview she reported that interrupted work resumed the same day took an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds. The peer-reviewed version of the same research, No Task Left Behind? (Mark, González & Harris, CHI 2005), reports 25 minutes and 26 seconds, with an average of 2.3 other tasks handled in between before the original work was picked back up.

The same body of work produces these numbers:

There is a second mechanism underneath the time cost, described by Sophie Leroy as attention residue (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2009). When you move to a new task, part of your attention stays behind on the old one. Her experiments found performance on the next task suffers as a result — and that simply finishing the previous task is not enough to release it. You need the sense of closure that a deadline creates.

That is why "I'll just get back to it" is a losing strategy. The unfinished work keeps you attached to it, not just the file open on your screen.

Why telling people you are busy does not work

You have already tried the obvious things. Some of them work on the people who respect your preferences, and fail on the ones you actually need to reach.

• Closed Slack status. Helps for messages, not for the person who is already walking towards your chair.
• A "Do Not Disturb" sign on the monitor. Studies of open-plan environments keep finding the same thing: the sign competes with everything else in the room, and the loudest competing signal is another person mid-sentence.
• Hiring headphones. Reduces sound, not approach. It also removes your ability to hear someone who genuinely needs you.
• Asking people to respect your time. The right ask, and often impossible. In a 2018 survey of 2,014 office workers across the US, UK and Australia, 69% of those in noisy environments said noise negatively affected their concentration, productivity and creativity — but nearly 80% also said noise simply made it harder to concentrate, which is a problem no amount of personal discipline fixes.

The pattern is consistent: every one of these solutions asks other people to cooperate. The one that doesn't is changing what they see. A grid of live video participants is the most legible "I am unavailable" signal that exists in an office, because everyone already has a strong template for what it means. You don't have to explain it, negotiate it, or follow up on it.

How the tool works

MeetingSimulator is a single web page. You open it, choose how many guests are in the call, press start, and the browser goes full screen with a video grid that looks and behaves like a live meeting. Behind it you keep working in another window.

Concretely, it does four things that other tools do not:

1. It removes the approach, not the message. Nothing has to be read, understood or negotiated. The interruption never starts.
2. It scales to your situation. One participant in a 1×1 grid looks like a one-to-one. Sixteen look like a large team stand-up. The grid reflows automatically.
3. It costs nothing to try. No account, no trial that expires, no install. It is a page that loads and runs.
4. It never sends data. The videos are local files. There is no call, no server, no recording.

Why real people, and not AI

This is the part that decides whether the tool works at all, and it is where MeetingSimulator is explicit: the participants are real human beings filmed in licensed stock footage. Nothing on the grid is generated by artificial intelligence.

The reason is mechanical rather than ideological. A simulated meeting is a visual deception, and deceptions fail on detail. Generative faces drift and shimmer when they move, blink at the wrong rate, and hold an uncanny stillness that reads as artificial within a couple of seconds. A grid of those is not "a meeting" — it is a screenshot of a meeting that everyone in the room can immediately tell is a screenshot of a meeting.

Stock footage has none of those problems, because it is footage. Real lighting, real micro-expressions, real skin texture. A colleague glances at your screen, registers a live call in progress, turns away, and never thinks about it again. That half-second of recognition is the entire product.

It is also a fairness position worth stating plainly: the people in these videos did real work in front of a camera. Showing their faces as a tool for looking busy is a considerably better use of that footage than a synthetic face, and considerably better than not paying anyone.

Where it helps most

Compared with other approaches

There are other "look busy" tools, and they solve a different problem. Most of them are built for you to appear productive while you do something else. This one is built for you to get work done.

Calendar blocks deserve a fairer hearing than they usually get. A meeting that is real, recurring and visible to the whole team is far more powerful than anything you put on your own screen. If you have the standing to run a team-wide no-meeting morning, do that first, and use MeetingSimulator for the individual blocks that policy cannot cover. The two are complementary rather than alternatives.

Is it ethical?

It is worth separating this from a different genre of tool that uses the same mechanism. A fake spreadsheet wrapped around a game is deception in service of avoidance. This is closer to a Do Not Disturb sign: the time it buys is supposed to go to work you have already committed to.

That distinction is not self-evident from the outside, and people in your office will not know the difference. Two things follow honestly. First, use the protected time for the work — a tool that buys an hour of deep work and then fills it with browsing is worse than not using the tool at all. Second, the better answer, where you can get it, is a team-wide norm: a shared understanding that some hours are for heads-down work. Where that exists, a tool like this is a useful individual implementation of a policy everyone has agreed to.

Questions people ask

Sources cited on this page: Gloria Mark, University of California, Irvine — "Too Many Interruptions at Work?" (Gallup Business Journal, 2006); Mark, González & Harris, No Task Left Behind?, CHI 2005; Mark, Gudith & Klocke, The Cost of Interrupted Work, CHI 2008; Sophie Leroy, Why is it so hard to do my work?, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 109(2), 2009; Radius Global Market Research for Interface, What's That Sound? (n = 2,014, US/UK/AU, 2018); Cal Newport, Deep Work (2016).