In short: According to lab studies, part of your attention stays with the task you left behind after an interruption. A three-line note written before you switch can help: where am I, what is the next action, what do I need to get back in? This is a practical rule I derive from lab findings. It costs two minutes at most. You can find out within a week whether it works for you.
Why you are not straight back in after an interruption
Imagine you are checking an analysis, row by row. A colleague asks in the chat for a figure. You look it up, reply and three minutes later you are back in the file. Only now you are reading row 13 for the third time and part of you is still composing the answer in your head. The interruption is over, but you are not back yet.
There are two lab findings on this. Mark, Gudith and Klocke (2008) found in a lab experiment that interrupted people worked faster, at the same quality. The authors interpret this as follows: people who are interrupted make up the time by working faster and pay for it with more stress, frustration and time pressure. In 2009, Sophie Leroy described attention residue in two experiments: when you switch away from an unfinished task, part of your attention stays behind and the next task suffers. Both are lab findings, not measurements taken in offices.
And the famous 23 minutes to get back into a task? I do not use that figure. It is often quoted from interviews with Gloria Mark and cannot be traced cleanly to a single study. Do not memorise the number, just this: the way back costs something.
The three-line note: a template to copy
Leroy and Glomb (2018) report four studies: people who expected to be able to resume the interrupted task only under time pressure showed more attention residue. A short plan for getting back in («ready to resume») reduced it and performance on the intervening task suffered less. According to the university's press material, it was tested in the lab, with students. Whether people then find their way back into the first task faster was, according to the same material, not examined.
From this I built a practical rule: if you write down where you will pick up again, it is easier to let go of the task you left behind. That you are then back in faster is my assumption, not a research finding. The three lines and the two minutes are also my own derivation.
Status: Where am I?
Next step: What is the first concrete action when I come back?
I need: File, link or open question for getting back in.
A made-up example:
Status: Analysis of customer enquiries, Q3 table, checked up to row 13.
Next step: Check row 14, do not work on the formatting yet.
I need: File «Analysis_Q3» in the team folder. Open question: does the customer count as a new customer?
Three tips to keep the note useful:
- An action, not a goal. «Check row 14» carries you back, «Finish the analysis» does not.
- Write it so that someone else could carry on. Then it will still be enough for you later.
- Two minutes at most. If the note turns into a full write-up, you will soon stop writing it.
When to write the note and how to interrupt others less
Not every switch needs a note. My practical rules:
- Nearly done? Finish first, then switch. In the lab, less residue remained after completed tasks than after abandoned ones (Leroy 2009). Applying that to «nearly done» is my own extrapolation.
- Hardly any time to return? Then the note is a must. For example because the task has to go out today or a meeting is about to start. That is an extrapolation too: in the lab, Leroy and Glomb found more residue in participants who expected to be able to return only under time pressure.
- Look at your own interruptions first. The «just a quick look» into the inbox, the glance at your phone. Count first (the tally sheet is in the experiment below), then judge.
Now the other side: every message you send can be somebody else's interruption. For your team, again as practical rules:
- Bundle your questions instead of sending single pings: one message with three questions instead of three messages.
- Put topics that concern the work into the channel rather than a chat, so that the answer reaches everyone. Exception: personal and customer data, where your organisation's own rule applies.
- Use an @-mention only when action is needed.
- If you write in the evening or during your focus time, you can schedule the message to send later, so that it arrives when the other person is meant to read it. Not for urgent matters.
On bundling there is a smartphone trial (Fitz and co-authors, 2019, 237 people): people who received their notifications bundled three times a day felt, according to the survey, more attentive, more productive and in a better mood. With no notifications at all there were hardly any benefits, but more fear of missing out. That was not a Teams study. My practical rule from this: pause and check at fixed times, rather than switching off for good.
If someone pulls you away and it is not urgent, one sentence helps: «I'll get back to you at 11:15, I'm just noting down where I am.» If it is urgent after all, at least write down the first action, for example «row 14». You add the rest later.
Where the note lives: one fixed place in Microsoft 365
First the method, then the tool. My practical rule: one fixed place is better than three good ones. Which place it is matters less. What counts is that it is always the same one, with the newest note at the top. The options:
- To Do with «My Day»: The note hangs on the task you are working on. Emails can be captured as a task in To Do with a single click (post from 2023).
- A «Car park» page in OneNote or Loop: new entries at the top, with the date.
- The Teams chat with yourself: handy, because Teams is open anyway. The price: you are sitting right in the middle of the ping channel.
- A flagged Outlook email: useful if the task hangs on an email. More on this in the post Show tasks in the Outlook inbox.
- A slip of paper next to the keyboard: no ping channel, but not with you everywhere.
Depending on your version, the menu entries are named slightly differently, so try it out once. Do not write customer or personal data into the note if your organisation has not provided that place for it. Which places are allowed and how long notes are kept is for IT, compliance or HR to clarify.
Silencing notifications is the implementation, not the method. According to the Microsoft 365 roadmap, Teams is currently rolling out a feature that pauses all notifications temporarily, without changing your settings. On top of that come presets per channel (all messages, only @mentions and replies, muted) and on the desktop Teams respects the Windows «Do not disturb» setting. The entries keep changing: your own client shows what you can see and what it is called. If any of this is missing for you, the «Do not disturb» shortcut from the tip on working with more focus in Teams helps (a tip from 2023, so try it in your own client). Focus blocks in the calendar are covered in the post on meeting overload. This one is about the moment of switching.
Your one-week experiment
Whether the note works for you, you can find out in five working days. This is a self-experiment, not proof:
- Before every switch that lasts longer than a few minutes, you write the three lines.
- Every lunchtime you note down two numbers: how many switches you had in the morning (a tally sheet with two columns: «I switch myself» and «Someone pulls me away») and how calm you felt (1 to 5). The first column is the one you can change tomorrow.
- On Friday you answer three questions: How quickly was I back in? (This is exactly what, according to the press material, the studies did not test.) Where was the note missing? Which kinds of incoming message will I bundle in future?
Evidence or not? Shown in the lab are the price of working faster, paid in stress and frustration (Mark 2008), attention residue (Leroy 2009) and that a short plan for getting back in reduced the residue (Leroy and Glomb 2018, with students according to press material). Whether the note helps you find your way back into the first task faster was, according to the press material, not examined and I know of no field study in an office on this. The note itself, the three lines and the two minutes are my practical rule. On the often-quoted ping figure from Microsoft: the Work Trend Index 2025 reports that people using Microsoft 365 receive a ping every two minutes during core working hours (275 a day). That applies to the 20 per cent with the most pings. The two minutes refer to an eight-hour day, the 275 to 24 hours. What is counted is pings received, not measured breaks in concentration and it is vendor data up to February 2025, excluding EU and education customers.
If several people in the team join in, the next question comes up: what does the fragmentation cost us? The efficiency calculator gives you an order of magnitude based on your own assumptions.
For over ten years I have supported teams in how they work with Microsoft 365, including from 2022 to 2026 at a Swiss private bank. If you want to agree on switches, pings and focus time together as a team, take a look at the page on fewer meetings. Or talk to me directly: book a free intro call.
