Interrupted every two minutes: what constant interruptions do to how leaders think

Short answer

1. Microsoft's 2025 workplace data shows that the most heavily pinged knowledge workers are interrupted by a meeting, email or message every two minutes, about 275 times a day.
2. Experiments suggest people keep up by working faster, and pay for it in stress. Part of their attention also stays stuck on the previous task.
3. Neither shows up in the work itself, which is why it is easy to ignore.

Most people who run a company don't need a study to tell them they are interrupted. They need it for a different reason: to see what the interruptions are doing, and what they cost, when nothing seems to be going wrong. Here is what the research measured, and where it stops.

How often are leaders interrupted?

In June 2025, Microsoft published a Work Trend Index special report, Breaking down the infinite workday. It combines anonymised Microsoft 365 usage data (up to 15 February 2025) with a survey of 31,000 knowledge workers in 31 markets. Among the findings:

Two details matter before you quote the headline. First, the "every two minutes" figure is based on the top 20% of users by ping volume, counted over a 24-hour day. It describes the heaviest users, not the average person. Second, the usage data excludes EU tenants. We don't have the same measurement for Vienna. What we do have is the survey line that leaders, slightly more than employees, describe their work as chaotic and fragmented.

Another source looks at CEOs specifically. Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria of Harvard Business School tracked how CEOs of large companies spent their time, around the clock, for 13 weeks, and published the results in Harvard Business Review in 2018. Their work is the best-known attempt to measure a CEO's week. The detailed figures sit behind HBR's paywall, so we don't quote them here.

Attention residue: why switching costs more than it seems

Attention residue is the part of your attention that stays with a previous task after you have switched to a new one. The term comes from Sophie Leroy, now at the University of Washington Bothell. In a 2009 paper in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, she showed in two experiments that people find it hard to move their attention away from an unfinished task, and that their performance on the next task suffers.

One detail from her work is counterintuitive. Simply finishing the first task was not enough to let go of it. People disengaged more fully when they had finished it under some time pressure, which gave a sense of closure.

Apply this to a typical leadership day. A board question at 10:00, a hiring call at 10:20, a customer escalation in between, a message from an investor while walking to the next meeting. Each switch leaves something behind. By the evening, it isn't one task that's still open in your head. It's a dozen.

Attention residue is the part of your mind that stays in the last meeting while your body walks into the next one.

Do interruptions make people worse at their work?

The honest answer is: not in the way you would expect.

In 2008, Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, with Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke of Humboldt University Berlin, ran an experiment at the CHI conference on human factors in computing. Participants worked on an email task and were interrupted every two minutes. The researchers expected interrupted work to be slower. It wasn't. People finished interrupted tasks in less time, with no difference in quality.

The cost showed up elsewhere. After only 20 minutes of interrupted work, participants reported significantly more stress, frustration, workload, effort and time pressure. They compensated by speeding up and paid for it in strain. The authors added that they could not say whether people would adapt over time or whether the strain would keep growing.

That is probably the most useful finding for anyone who leads. The output looks fine, so the system looks fine. What gets used up is not visible on any dashboard.

In experiments, interrupted people kept the quality of their work by speeding up. The price showed up as stress, not as mistakes.

Gloria Mark has also tracked how long people stay on a single screen before switching. In a 2024 interview with the University of California newsroom, she said her first study, based on 2003 data, found an average of about two and a half minutes. By 2020, the average attention paid to a single screen was 47 seconds. That is a measure of behaviour on screens, not a clinical measure of attention span, but the direction is clear.

Does a phone on the table matter if you don't touch it?

In 2017, Adrian Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy and Maarten Bos published "Brain Drain" in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. In two experiments, the mere presence of participants' own smartphone reduced their available cognitive capacity, measured as working memory and fluid intelligence, even when they did not check it. The effect was largest for people most dependent on their phones.

The study became famous, and later research has been more cautious. A 2023 meta-analysis by Tobias Böttger, Michael Poschik and Klaus Zierer pooled 22 studies with 43 effects. It confirmed a small overall negative effect (Hedges' g = −0.14), clearest for memory. For attention alone, the effect was not significant, and results varied a lot between regions.

So the fair summary is: the effect seems real, but small, and it depends on the person and the task. A phone on the table is not a disaster. It is one more thing quietly asking for a share of your attention.

What the research does not tell us

Is there any evidence on recovery?

There is a long line of research on what helps directed attention recover. One well-known example: in 2008, Marc Berman, John Jonides and Stephen Kaplan reported in Psychological Science that in two experiments, a walk in nature or even looking at pictures of nature improved performance on directed-attention tasks compared with urban settings. They connect it to attention restoration theory: natural settings hold attention gently, so the effortful kind can rest.

That doesn't mean a walk fixes a fragmented week. It suggests attention behaves like a resource that can recover, but only when the input changes, not when the same stream simply slows down.

A question worth asking

Not a tip, because the research doesn't give one that fits everyone. A question that comes out of it:

In the last week, what was the longest stretch in which nothing and nobody could reach you, and what did you think about during it?

Some people find the second part harder to answer than the first. That is often where the interesting thinking was meant to happen.

Where Stilla Circle fits

At the Stilla Circle evenings we are preparing in Vienna, phones stay in an envelope by the door, by choice. Guests cook in pairs with a chef and talk at one table, with no titles and no selling. The idea is simple: a few hours with no switching, so attention can stay with one thing, and with the people in the room.

FAQ

Sources

1. Microsoft WorkLab (17 June 2025). Breaking down the infinite workday — Work Trend Index special report. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/breaking-down-infinite-workday (accessed 16 Oct 2026)
2. Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress. Proceedings of CHI 2008, ACM, 107–110. https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/chi08-mark.pdf (accessed 16 Oct 2026)
3. Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168–181. https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jobhdp/v109y2009i2p168-181.html (accessed 16 Oct 2026)
4. Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), 140–154. https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jacres/doi10.1086-691462.html (accessed 16 Oct 2026)
5. Böttger, T., Poschik, M., & Zierer, K. (2023). Does the Brain Drain Effect Really Exist? A Meta-Analysis. Behavioral Sciences, 13(9), 751. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10525686/ (accessed 16 Oct 2026)
6. Schelenz, R. (2 Jan 2024). How to sharpen your attention and meet your goals in 2024 (interview with Gloria Mark). University of California Newsroom. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/how-sharpen-your-attention-and-meet-your-goals-2024 (accessed 16 Oct 2026)
7. Porter, M. E., & Nohria, N. (2018). How CEOs Manage Time. Harvard Business Review, July–August 2018. https://hbr.org/2018/07/how-ceos-manage-time (accessed 16 Oct 2026)
8. Berman, M. G., Jonides, J., & Kaplan, S. (2008). The cognitive benefits of interacting with nature. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1207–1212. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02225.x (accessed 16 Oct 2026)