We counted every interruption for a month. Nobody liked the number, and it changed how our whole team works.
By Clara Lindqvist · 23 September 2026 · 12 min read
A desk at seven in the morning, before the first notification.
In March, eleven of us agreed to keep a tally. Every time something pulled us out of the work in front of us — a chat ping, a calendar nudge, a colleague leaning over the desk — we made a mark on a card. No judgement, no apps, just a pencil.
By the end of the first week the average was 87 marks a day. That is one every five and a half minutes of a working day. Most of them lasted less than a minute. None of them felt like a problem on its own.
The trouble is what happens after. The research on this is old and consistent: getting back to where you were takes far longer than the interruption itself. We had been paying that toll dozens of times a day, and calling it being responsive.
“Nobody decided we should answer everything within four minutes. It just became the job.”
— MARTA OKAFOR, HEAD OF SUPPORT
What we tried instead
We did not ban anything. We moved the defaults. Chat notifications are off until eleven. Meetings start at quarter past, so there is always a little air around them. And anything that genuinely cannot wait gets a phone call, which, it turns out, almost nothing needs.
The tally dropped to 31 a day within a fortnight. Response times to customers did not get worse; the median actually improved by nine minutes, because the people answering were no longer answering in fragments.
What surprised us most was what people said they missed. Not the speed. The feeling of being needed. That, more than any tool, is what the rest of this essay is about.
