According to UC Berkley, it can take the average office worker 23 minutes to regain focus after an interruption. In this experiment, office workers in co-working spaces were observed by a Machine Learning Object-Recognition network to count the time that they spent uninterrupted at their desks.
The above graph shows the rolling average of the number of uninterrupted minutes the worker has throughout the day. For simplicity and quantifiability, time spent away from the desk was logged as interrupted time. Once a worker has been uninterrupted for a certain period, the chart represents a second period of “productive” time. For visualization, data was normalized between 0 and 1.
Worker data was collected over 3 weeks in September 2023.
Sources:
https://ics.uci.edu/~gmark/chi08-mark.pdf
https://www.interruptions.net/literature/Bailey-Interact01.pdf