Coming back from an interruption
You will be interrupted. The cost is in the return, and the return is trainable.
The famous claim is that it takes twenty-three minutes to recover from an interruption. That figure comes from observing office workers who typically didn’t return to the original task at all, and it describes an average, not a law. The recovery is faster if you make it deliberate.
Why the return is expensive
When you’re deep in a task you’re holding a small structure in working memory - where you are, what you tried, what’s next. An interruption doesn’t just take your attention, it dumps that structure. The cost of returning is the cost of rebuilding it.
So the goal isn’t avoiding all interruptions, which is impossible. It’s making the structure cheap to rebuild.
The breadcrumb
Before you turn to whatever interrupted you, take five seconds and write down the sentence you were about to write, or the thing you were about to try. Half-finished is fine. Ugly is fine.
That five seconds routinely saves several minutes, because you return to a breadcrumb instead of to a blank space and a vague sense of loss.
The two-minute return
When you come back:
- Read the breadcrumb.
- Re-read the last paragraph or line of what you were doing - not the whole thing, the last bit.
- Do the smallest piece of the task, badly, immediately.
Point three is the one people skip. Rebuilding context by re-reading is passive and slow; doing something, however poorly, rebuilds it fast. Fix a typo. Write a bad version of the next sentence. Momentum reassembles the structure better than review does.
The interruptions you cause
Most interruptions during a focused block are self-generated: a thought about something else, a small urge to check. The scrap of paper from lesson two handles these. Write it, don’t act on it, carry on.
Count them one day. People are usually surprised to find that they interrupt themselves several times more often than anyone else interrupts them.
You cannot prevent interruptions. You can leave yourself a note before you go, which turns a twenty-minute recovery into a two-minute one.
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