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You finally have the sentence in your head, the one you’ve been searching for over the last ten minutes. Then a message pops up in the bottom right corner. Just a quick question. You answer it fast, because it won’t take long. While you’re at it, you notice an email that’s been sitting there since yesterday. Two minutes later you’re back in front of your document, rereading the last few paragraphs. The sentence is gone.
Moments like these seem trivial. They rarely last long and have long been part of a normal working day for many people. A message in the chat, an email, a phone call, someone standing in the doorway, or you reminding yourself of something that still needs doing. None of these interruptions is particularly draining on its own. And yet a day full of these small switches can be surprisingly exhausting.
Surveys show this too. In the 2025 TK Stress Report, 58 percent of working people said that interruptions and disturbances put a strain on them at work. Around half also named the flood of information from emails, internal messages, and other communication channels as a source of stress. This makes one thing clear: it’s not only the amount of work that matters. The way we make our way through that work can cost energy too.
The Interruption Is Often Not the Real Problem
When we leave a task that required concentration, it doesn’t simply disappear from our mind. We first have to grasp what the new thing is about, respond to it, and then rebuild the context we were working in before. The more complex the task was, the more clearly you can feel this moment. You look at the screen and still know what you were just doing, but no longer quite where the thought was supposed to lead.
The organizational psychologist Sophie Leroy describes part of this effect as “attention residue.” The idea is that our attention doesn’t always fully come along when we switch between tasks. Especially when a task isn’t yet finished, something of it stays behind in our mind. You’re already sitting in the next video call and still thinking about the paragraph you didn’t finish writing. Or you’re back in your document but still occupied with the message that just came in.
In Leroy’s experiments, these mental leftovers were shown to impair performance on the next task. That’s a different way of looking at what everyday language often calls multitasking. With demanding mental work, we usually don’t do several things at once; we switch quickly between them. And that switching isn’t free. A single switch barely registers, but on a day with many interruptions, this reorientation happens over and over. You don’t start from scratch twenty times, but a small piece of the way, yes.
The Work Still Gets Done – and That’s Exactly Why It Goes Unnoticed
What’s particularly interesting is that interruptions don’t necessarily make us visibly slower. In a study by Gloria Mark and colleagues, participants sometimes even completed interrupted tasks faster, without the quality of their work suffering. At the same time, those same participants reported more stress, frustration, time pressure, and effort. One possible explanation from the researchers: the lost time was at least partly made up for by working faster afterward.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons interruptions are so easily underestimated in everyday work. The work still gets done. From the outside, an afternoon then looks completely normal. The presentation was finished, three emails answered, and the conversation with the colleague took place as well. What you can’t see in the finished presentation are the many times the thread of thought had to be picked up again. What looks like functioning productivity can feel quite exhausting from the inside.
This also explains why you can be worn out on some evenings even though no single task was especially difficult. The strain may have come less from what you did than from how often you switched back and forth between different things.
A Message Doesn’t Even Have to Be Opened
Even a notification we don’t respond to can pull our attention toward it. In an experiment by Cary Stothart and colleagues, notifications on a mobile phone were enough to impair performance on a demanding attention task. The participants didn’t even have to use the phone.
Of course this doesn’t mean that every Outlook or Teams notification automatically ruins our concentration. What’s interesting is rather that a piece of information can already claim our attention before we consciously engage with it at all. A sender’s name appears on the screen and immediately a small extra question arises: What does this person want? Is it urgent? Do I need to react? Maybe you decide not to open the message. Even so, it was noticed and processed. For a brief moment, one task became two.
Digital communication amplifies this effect, because messages are often designed for exactly this purpose: they’re meant to be noticed. Sounds, red badges, little numbers, and preview windows make sure new information doesn’t slip by unnoticed. For communication, that’s practical. For focused work, not always.
The Interruption Comes From Us Surprisingly Often
It would be too easy, though, to blame only chat programs, emails, or other people. A considerable share of our interruptions begins in our own head.
You’re working on a presentation and remember that you still need to schedule an appointment. So you quickly open the calendar so you won’t forget. There you see the appointment on Thursday and think of the document you still need for it. You dig out the email about it, read another message along the way, and a few minutes later you’re several mental steps away from the presentation.
None of that was entirely unnecessary. The appointment did need to be scheduled, the document really is needed. It just probably didn’t have to happen in that exact moment. On the computer especially, these detours have become very easy. Almost any thought can be followed immediately. A term occurs to us, so we search for it. We remember an email and open the inbox. We don’t want to forget something, so we’d rather do it right away. What might once have required a walk to another office, a phone call, or reaching for a file folder is today only a click away.
That’s an enormous convenience. At the same time, it makes it very easy to keep leaving your own flow of work. So the interesting question isn’t only: Who interrupts me? But also: How often do I interrupt myself?
Not Every Interruption Is a Problem
Work can’t and shouldn’t consist of eight hours of undisturbed solo work. A colleague needs feedback, a client calls, a good idea comes up spontaneously in the team. Some interruptions are necessary, others even pleasant. After a monotonous task, a short conversation can relieve rather than disturb. What matters, then, is less whether an interruption happens than when and during which task.
The German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA) points out in its research on work interruptions that demanding activities in particular can react sensitively to disturbances. The more a task draws on concentration, working memory, and complex thinking, the harder getting back in can become. The research it reviewed also shows connections between frequent work interruptions and impaired performance, errors, and emotional exhaustion.
A quick question during a routine bit of filing can therefore hardly disturb. The same question at the moment you’re trying to follow a complicated calculation or formulate a difficult text can cost considerably more. The length of the interruption may be the same in both cases; its actual effect is not.
When Constant Availability Becomes the Normal Mode of Work
Something else has changed: for many employees, communication now runs in parallel with the actual work. The email program stays open, next to it the team chat, the phone lies on the desk. Whoever writes gets an answer as quickly as possible.
This can even feel productive. Small tasks disappear right away, no one waits long, and the inbox stays reasonably manageable. At the same time, a mode of work emerges in which part of our attention is permanently reserved for whatever might arrive next. Fast availability and focused work are both valuable. They just can’t be combined equally well at every moment.
That’s why work interruptions aren’t treated only as a personal time-management problem. The BAuA’s recommendations include, among other things, low-disturbance working hours, handling emails in batches, and more room to decide when an incoming request actually needs to be dealt with. That’s an important distinction. Concentration isn’t solely an ability of the individual. It also depends on whether the work environment allows concentration in the first place. Someone expected to respond to a new message every two minutes doesn’t automatically have an attention problem when sustained focused work becomes difficult.
Maybe Your Concentration Hasn’t Actually Gotten Worse
After a fragmented working day, it’s easy to feel that you simply can’t concentrate properly anymore. Many people know the thought that their attention used to be somehow better. Then come the attempts to be more disciplined, to put the phone away, or to force yourself even harder to keep going.
Sometimes, though, the problem isn’t that concentration has become harder in general. Maybe it just has to be rebuilt very often. For a demanding task, even a limited stretch can help, one in which as little new as possible comes in. This doesn’t require a meticulously optimized working day, and not necessarily several hours of complete quiet. Sometimes 30 or 45 minutes are enough, with the preview of new messages switched off and spontaneous thoughts landing on a notepad for now. Afterward, the email program is allowed to open again.
The point isn’t to become as unreachable as possible. It’s about not letting every new piece of information automatically decide where your attention goes next.
A Small Exercise: Where Does Your Attention Go?
For half a working day, take a piece of paper or a simple note. Every time you leave a task before you’re finished with it, make a mark. A single word next to it is enough: mail, chat, call, colleague, or own thought. You don’t need to change anything else for now.
When you later return to your original task, notice briefly how easily that goes. Are you back in it right away? Or do you first have to reread, search, or think about where you left off?
Look at your notes at the end of the half day and ask yourself two questions:
Which of these interruptions actually had to happen right away?
And with which tasks was it especially hard to find your way back in afterward?
From that, choose a single change for the next working day. Maybe the email program stays closed for 45 minutes during a demanding task. Maybe you switch off the preview of new chat messages. Or you put a notepad beside you where spontaneous thoughts can land, to be followed up on later.
Not every interruption can be avoided. That’s not the point. What’s more interesting is how many of them have simply happened so far, without you ever deciding whether right now was really the right moment for them.
Sources and Further Reading
Techniker Krankenkasse (2025). TK-Stressreport 2025. Findings on strain from work interruptions, disturbances, and information overload.
Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168–181. DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002.
Mark, G., Gudith, D. & Klocke, U. (2008). The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 107–110. DOI: 10.1145/1357054.1357072.
Stothart, C., Mitchum, A. & Yehnert, C. (2015). The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 41(4), 893–897. DOI: 10.1037/xhp0000100.
Rigotti, T. (2016). Psychische Gesundheit in der Arbeitswelt – Störungen und Unterbrechungen. Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Dortmund. DOI: 10.21934/baua:bericht20160713/1e.
Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsschutz und Arbeitsmedizin. Arbeitsunterbrechungen und Multitasking täglich meistern. BAuA Praxis.
