Office Workers Switch Tasks Every 11 Minutes and Take 25 Minutes to Return to Original Task
(p. 12) As economics students know, switching involves costs. But how much? When a consumer switches banks, or a company switches suppliers, it's relatively easy to count the added expense of the hassle of change. When your brain is switching tasks, the cost is harder to quantify.
There have been a few efforts to do so: Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, found that a typical office worker gets only 11 minutes between each interruption, while it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption. But there has been scant research on the quality of work done during these periods of rapid toggling.
For the full commentary, see:
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 3, 2013.)
The Gloria Mark paper referred to in the commentary is:
Mark, Gloria, Victor M. Gonzalez, and Justin Harris. "No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work." Proceedings of ACM CHI'05, Portland, OR, (April 2-7, 2005): 321-30.
Another relevant Gloria Mark paper is:
Mark, Gloria, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Kloecke. "The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress." Proceeding of the Twenty-sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'08), Florence, Italy, ACM Press (2008): 107-10.