How do I deal with interruptions at work?

How to handle interruptions at work, step by step

1. Schedule protected focus time. Put one or two blocks on your shared calendar for deep work. A visible commitment is far easier to defend than a vague wish to be left alone.
2. Mute the digital taps. Turn off chat and email notifications during focus blocks and check them on a schedule instead. Most "urgent" messages can wait an hour without any harm.
3. Signal that you're unavailable. Set a busy status, wear headphones, or close the door. A clear signal stops interruptions before they happen, so you're not refusing people in the moment.
4. Capture your place before you switch. When you must stop, write one line about exactly what you were doing and the next step. That note is what lets you drop back in instead of restarting.
5. Batch your own interruptions. Collect your questions for a colleague and ask them together, rather than tapping them on the shoulder six separate times. Interruptions run both ways.
6. Renegotiate what counts as urgent. Agree response-time norms with your team, so a non-emergency question gets a reply within a few hours instead of demanding an instant switch.

Why interruptions cost more than the minute they take

The real damage from an interruption isn't the two minutes it takes; it's the reorientation afterwards. Research by Gloria Mark and colleagues, tracking people through their working days, found it took an average of about 23 minutes to return to the original task after being diverted to something else. Your attention has to rebuild the context it was holding: where you were, what you were about to do, and the half-formed thought you just lost.

Frequent interruptions also change how you work, and not for the better. The same research found that people compensate for interrupted work by going faster, but they pay for it with more stress, frustration and effort. A day sliced into fragments by chat pings and "got a sec?" questions can feel exhausting even when little of substance got done, because the mind never settles into the sustained concentration that real work needs.

Common mistakes

• Leaving chat and email notifications on all day, so every message interrupts whatever you're doing.
• Dropping everything for every "quick question" as if all of them were genuinely urgent.
• Trying to keep working while half-listening to the interruption, which botches both.
• Switching tasks without noting where you were, so you lose minutes re-orienting each time.