Imagine an electrician troubleshooting an intermittent short in a commercial building. They’ve been tracing circuits for an hour — testing connections, ruling out causes, building a mental map of what’s wired to what. Then the phone rings. Another customer, different side of town, says it’s urgent. So the electrician packs up, drives across town, handles that job, and an hour later drives back to the first one. Now they’re standing in front of the panel trying to remember which circuits they’d already tested, what they’d ruled out, and where the trail was leading.
No service company would operate this way. It’s obviously wasteful — and the real cost isn’t the drive, it’s picking up the interrupted diagnostic work. The electrician has to retrace steps they’d already taken. The job takes longer and the risk of missing something goes up. Most service managers would call it what it is: a broken process.
If this sounds absurd, consider how many times you were pulled out of focused work this week.
Every Ping Is a Trip Across Town
Think about what happens when a Slack message arrives in the middle of deep work. You’re three layers into a design problem, holding the mental model of how the pieces connect. The notification pulls you out. Maybe you glance at it. Maybe you respond. Maybe it takes thirty seconds.
But getting back to where you were? That’s the trip back to the first job. Research suggests it takes more than twenty minutes to fully re-engage with complex work after an interruption. Not twenty minutes of staring at a wall — twenty minutes of mentally rebuilding context. Reloading the state of the problem. Remembering where you were headed.
Thirty seconds of interruption. Twenty minutes of recovery. That’s the real cost, and it’s almost entirely invisible.
Now multiply it. A typical knowledge worker gets interrupted dozens of times a day. Each one is another trip across town. By mid-afternoon, you’ve spent most of your day trying to get back to where you were.
I’ve experienced this in different ways over the years. When I’m tracing a problem, I might have six terminal windows open, a dozen browser tabs with documentation, and a mental architecture that took forty-five minutes to construct. A Slack message pulls me out for thirty seconds, and that whole structure starts to crumble.
Or it’s the back-to-back meetings on completely unrelated topics — walking out of an infrastructure discussion and straight into a product strategy session, my brain still finishing the first conversation while the second one is already moving. I looked at my screen at 5 PM earlier this week — five hundred browser tabs, multiple IDEs, half-written messages everywhere — and realized the chaos on my desktop was a perfect picture of the chaos in my head. I’d been everywhere and nowhere.
The Service Company Would Never
What makes the electrician analogy useful is that few people would debate it in the physical world. No service manager would pull a technician off a half-finished diagnosis to answer a scheduling call and say, “Well, we need to be responsive.” They’d call it what it is: waste.
But in knowledge work, the same waste hides in plain sight. Open-door policies, always-on Slack channels, “quick question” culture — the whole workflow revolves around it. Meetings that could have been messages, scheduled right in the middle of someone’s only focus block.
Do you know how much this is actually costing your team — not just in throughput, but in the quality of their work and the quality of their days? Most leaders don’t, because nothing on the dashboard tracks it.
There’s growing research that says we should. Microsoft and GitHub’s SPACE framework now includes “efficiency and flow” as a core dimension of developer productivity. The data suggests developers need roughly fifty minutes of uninterrupted work just to reach a flow state, and that teams who protect two-hour focus blocks consistently produce higher-quality work. I’m reviewing these metrics and considering adding contiguous focus time as a measure for my own teams — because if you can’t see the erosion, you can’t fight it.
And the work that suffers most — architecture decisions, strategic thinking, complex debugging — is also the hardest to measure. The cost shows up months later as decisions that weren’t fully thought through or products that missed something important.
Protecting the Work Itself
What concerns me most is that this cost is structural, not personal. Individual discipline helps, but if the culture expects instant availability, you’re fighting the current. One person batching their Slack while everyone else expects real-time responses just creates friction. It’s a leadership problem, and personal time management alone won’t fix it.
The teams that handle this well tend to batch their communication, check messages at intervals instead of constantly, and treat a two-hour focus block like what it is — the most valuable part of the workday. The organizations behind those teams treat attention as a finite, expensive resource to be allocated deliberately — they design their communication patterns around it instead of assuming everyone can just “manage their time better.”
I’ve been in this industry long enough to remember when this happened naturally. You checked your email a few times a day. Nobody expected instant responses to anything short of an emergency. The work got done. Arguably, it got done better.
Somewhere along the way, we traded focus for responsiveness and called it progress.
Start by Asking
One of the simplest things a leader can do is something easily overlooked: ask your team how they work best. When do they do their deepest thinking? Morning? After lunch? Late in the day? What pulls them out most often? What would they protect if they could?
The answers are usually specific and surprisingly varied. I’m a member of the 5 AM club — my clearest thinking happens before most people are online, and by mid-morning I’ve already done my best work for the day. But that’s me. One person on a team might do their best architecture work before 10 AM. Another hits their stride after the morning meetings clear out — and someone else needs a long unbroken afternoon to get anything meaningful done. It’s hard to know without asking, and in my experience, it’s a question that rarely gets asked.
Once you know, you can start designing around it instead of over it. Maybe you cluster meetings in the early afternoon so mornings stay open. Maybe you establish a team norm that Slack can wait an hour. These aren’t big organizational overhauls — they’re small, deliberate choices that protect your team’s ability to think.
The Discipline Nobody Talks About
None of this is new. Cal Newport made the case for protecting deep work years ago, and he’s not the only one. The research supports it. The logic is hard to argue with. We all nod along when someone explains the cost of context switching.
And then we check Slack.
Knowing isn’t the hard part. The hard part is the discipline and diligence to actually protect one of the most valuable resources an organization has — sustained human attention. We’ve spent decades optimizing physical logistics. Route planning software, delivery algorithms, just-in-time manufacturing — we’ve optimized every physical constraint we can measure. But we keep adding more channels, more notifications, more reasons to make another trip across town.
The electrician would look at our workdays and wonder how we stay in business.