.1 Calculator Interruption Creep - Productivity Pit Stop

Your Team

How many people are on this team?

Type of Work

What kind of work does your team primarily do? This affects how long it takes to recover focus after each interruption.

Mostly routine and administrative — emails, scheduling, standard processes Mixed — some routine, some thinking and problem-solving Mostly complex — analysis, writing, client work, creative or strategic thinking

How Often Does Interruption Creep Hit?

Research* shows Interruption Creep costs far more than the time each interruption takes:

A 2-minute interruption can drain far more in lost momentum and recovery time
Complex work takes significantly longer to resume than routine tasks
Most people are interrupted every 3 to 5 minutes in open-plan environments
Only 1 in 20 interrupted tasks is resumed at the same point

*Sources:

- Interruption recovery: Gloria Mark, UC Irvine, "The Cost of Interrupted Work" (replicated 2023)

- Focus fragmentation: Microsoft Research, "Productivity and Distraction" study

- Task resumption: Iqbal and Bailey, CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Think about a typical day for someone on your team. How often are they pulled off what they are working on?

A few times — maybe 5 interruptions a day Regularly — around 10 to 15 a day Constantly — 20 or more a day Let me enter my own estimate

Average number of interruptions per person per day

How Long Does Each Interruption Last?

On average, how long is each interruption? Think of the typical knock on the door, Teams message, or colleague question.

Quick — under 5 minutes Medium — around 10 minutes Long — 20 minutes or more Let me enter my own estimate

Average duration per interruption (minutes)

Your Interruption Creep — The Drain

Monthly Capacity Drained by Interruption Creep

0 hours

0 hours per year

Full-Time Equivalent (FTE)

Full-time people worth of capacity lost annually

What this includes: 0 of direct interruption time per month, plus 0 of focus recovery time — the hidden part of the drain most organisations never count. Your team loses an average of 0 per person per day just getting back to where they were.

This represents 0% of your team's monthly capacity draining away through interruption and focus recovery.

And this does not include the quality cost — decisions made without sufficient thought, errors from constant task switching, or the deep work that never happens because sustained focus is never reached.

Plug this drain this week

The number above is an estimate. Here is how to measure your own reality — and start plugging the drain.

Track for one day. Keep a simple tally — a tick on paper or a note on your phone each time you are pulled off a task. Just count. Do not judge.

Note the gap. When interrupted, write down the time. Write down when you returned to focused work. The gap between those two numbers is your personal focus recovery cost.

Do it for a week. At the end of the week, multiply your daily tally by your average gap. That is your personal Interruption Creep cost — your number, not ours.

Share it with your team. Not as a complaint — as a conversation. Ask them to do the same. When a team measures its own interruption cost together, something shifts. That conversation is where the drain gets plugged.

Ready to plug this drain?

If Interruption Creep is affecting your team, a 20-minute conversation can identify the practical fixes to apply straight away.

Book the Find & Fix Session

Explore the other time drains

Your biggest drain is the best place to start. If you want a broader picture, explore the others below.

Inbox Overload Meeting Spillover Follow-Through Lag Priority Blur Underused Tools