The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress

How are you feeling?

Not about the business — about your own energy. Is this sustainable?

Constantly reactive. Feel like I never get deep work done anymore. By the end of the day I've been busy all day and done nothing.

On willpower and decision fatigue

The "busy but done nothing" feeling has a physiological explanation. Decision fatigue depletes cognitive resources — the quality of your decisions degrades across the day even when you feel fine.

What's actually pulling you out?

When you're trying to do deep work, what breaks the concentration?

Slack, mostly. Someone always needs something. And I feel like I have to respond quickly or I'm blocking them. It's never one big thing — it's fifty small ones.

Interruption cost is not what you think

You're treating each Slack message as a small cost. It's not — the real cost is context restoration time. Jason Fried's argument is that interruption is structural, not a discipline problem — and can only be solved structurally.

The real number

If you had to estimate: how much focused time do you actually get per day?

Maybe two hours? On a good day. Most days less. Used to be six.

The 23-minute rule

Two focused hours matches exactly what the research predicts for high-interruption environments. Gloria Mark at UC Irvine measured the actual cost: 23 minutes to regain full concentration after a single interruption. With fifty Slack messages a day, you're mathematically never fully in. This is the paper that changes how you set team norms.