23 Minutes to regain focus

I received a company wide email at work recently from a colleague, where they were recommending an app to help people concentrate during work hours by minimising distractions. What caught my eye, though, was a justification given for the need for this app. Apparently if you've been distracted at work, it takes people on average 23 minutes - or, to be precise, 23 minutes and 15 seconds - to fully regain your focus and get back to your work properly. Now, as a skeptic, the specificity of that number alerted me that this was probably nonsense. On top of the unlikely nature of that number, I wondered what relevance “fully” regaining your focus is. If your focus (however that may be measured) is 95% recovered in the first 60 seconds after a disruption, and the rest of the time is a slow crawl to 100%, I imagine that's not so bad. If it's a linear recovery, then it's not so great.

What I wasn't prepared for when I went searching for the source of this claim was a) just how many websites seem to have parroted the 23 minutes thing, and b) how abysmal and flimsy the “study” behind it all was.

After a quick scan of the paper, I quickly penned a response email - which I just sent to my colleague, rather than the entire company. And don't worry, I have a very good relationship with this colleague, so the email was taken in good faith as the skeptical ranting of a middle aged man! Here's what I responded with:

_Hi xxxxxx,

I've read the “study” that the 23 minutes claim is based on (https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/chi08-mark.pdf), and it's embarrassingly bad. 48 participants, so a tiny cohort; all university students, so not at all representative of the average office worker; an abysmal “simulation” of an office environment and tasks; and conclusions that absolutely did not follow from the dubious data. The actual findings of this “study” (and I keep putting that word in quotes because this can't really be called science) were that people who are interrupted completed their tasks faster, while not making any more mistakes, than the uninterrupted people. Of course, this result is also untrustworthy, because of all the myriad issues with the study that totally invalidate any of its findings.

Fun fact: the study doesn't even mention 23 minutes. That's not even a daft claim made by the study author, it's a daft claim made by someone else based on their shoddy reading of this shoddy paper.

Cheers,

mark._

Now, I'm guessing I just scratched the surface with my quick reading of this paper. If anyone else wants to read it through and critique it properly, I'm sure we'd be willing to publish your thoughts!