Interrupted every two minutes: what that does to deep work

A morning in two-minute slices

It is 9:12 on a Tuesday. You open the quarterly plan, find the paragraph you left yesterday and read the first line. A chat pops up in the corner. You answer it, come back and read the same line again. Then an email lands. Then a meeting reminder.

Microsoft has put a number on that kind of morning. In June 2025, it published data from its workplace software showing that employees are interrupted every two minutes during core work hours, 275 times a day, by meetings, emails or chats¹. The same report counts 117 emails a day for the average worker, most of them skimmed in under 60 seconds, and 153 Teams messages per weekday¹.

Those figures come from anonymised usage signals up to 15 February 2025, plus a survey of 31,000 workers in 31 markets¹. That is company data, not a peer-reviewed study. The research on what interruptions do to the person on the receiving end is older, and it sits in peer-reviewed journals.

Part of your mind stays on the last task

In 2009, the management researcher Sophie Leroy gave a name to that feeling of reading the same line twice: attention residue. Across two experiments, she showed that people need to stop thinking about one task before they can fully move their attention to the next one and do it well².

We rarely get that clean stop. Leroy found it is hard to pull your attention away from an unfinished task, and your work on the next task suffers². Even finishing the first task was not enough on its own. What helped people let go was finishing it under some time pressure².

Leroy did not count pings in a real office. Our reading: if every switch leaves a little residue, 275 switches a day leave very little room for deep work, the long stretch where you hold a whole problem in your head.

Faster, but at a price

You might expect interrupted people to simply work slower. A 2008 lab study by Gloria Mark and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, found something stranger. Its 48 participants, most of them university students, answered emails while being interrupted by phone or instant message³. The interruptions came every two minutes, the same rhythm Microsoft reports today³. They finished the interrupted tasks in less time, with no difference in quality³.

The bill arrived somewhere else. People made up for the interruptions by working faster, and they reported more stress, higher frustration, more time pressure and more effort³. After only 20 minutes of interrupted work, those ratings were already significantly higher³.

A 2025 survey of 354 IT employees in China, published in Frontiers in Psychology, points the same way across a whole job. Job stress partly explained the link between multitasking and lower wellbeing at work⁴. People with more freedom to organise their own work showed a weaker link between multitasking and stress⁴.

Four ways to keep a block of deep work

One of these habits has been tested directly. The others follow from what the studies describe, and none of the studies here put them to a test.

Book the block like a meeting. Put it in your calendar with a plain title, such as "writing the Q4 plan", and close chat and email for that time. Microsoft's data shows meetings filling the hours people could use for deep focus¹. A block in your own calendar is a meeting nobody can move without asking you.

Write a ready-to-resume note. This is the tested one. When you have to stop, jot down where you are and what the next step is. In a 2025 field study, 50 employees kept a daily diary on four occasions⁵. On days with more intrusions they reported more attention residue and more exhaustion, and writing these short plans reduced the residue⁵.

Batch your inbox. Pick a few set times to read email and chat, and let the rest wait. Nobody in these studies tested this one. But at 117 emails a day¹, answering each one as it lands is how a morning turns into two-minute slices.

Close before you switch. Leroy tested time pressure in the lab, not this exact habit. Her results suggest that a little time pressure while finishing a task helps you let go of it². One way to use that: before a meeting, give yourself a short, fixed window to finish one small piece and mark it done.