CONCEPT
Interruption Costs
The compound expense of disrupted work — including the
23-minute recovery lag, residue generation, and the destroyed value of
interrupted flow.
Interruption costs are the full cognitive, temporal, and quality expenses incurred when a knowledge worker's sustained engagement is disrupted. The costs include immediate effects (the time spent handling the interruption itself), recovery lag (the 23+ minutes
Gloria Mark measured before performance returns to pre-interruption levels),
attention residue (the persistence of interrupted-task elements degrading subsequent work), and constellation destruction (the loss of the assembled cognitive state that sustained engagement had built). For complex knowledge work, especially AI-augmented creative tasks that produce deep flow states, the total cost of a single interruption can exceed an hour of degraded performance even when the interruption itself lasted seconds. Organizations treating interruptions as brief, isolated events systematically underestimate their consequences and design workflows that maximize rather than minimize these compounding costs.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The compound structure is what conventional analysis misses. An interruption that takes two minutes to handle — a colleague's question, a notification requiring response, an agent's output needing quick evaluation — appears to cost two minutes. The actual cost includes the