It starts with an innocent tap on the shoulder — a colleague asks a brief question about an upcoming deadline. No big deal, right? Two conversations and four emails later, you’ve officially wasted almost an hour.

I’m not here to tell you the story of how companies big and small fail to acknowledge the importance of using proper collaboration tools. The cat is out of the bag and has been for years. The market simply isn’t mature enough to take the plunge. What I want to share with you today is the typical scenario where office hours become pure chaos due to simple distractions like the one mentioned above. I’m 100% sure these will strike a cord with fellow office workers far and wide.

Scientifically proven

Research has shown that when someone interrupts you from a task, it takes about 15 minutes to fully re-ignite your attention span for that particular task. In other words, if you’re busy composing an email and a colleague asks you to help him with something, when you return to your writing it takes a quarter of an hour to get the same neurons firing the exact same impulses (ideas) back and forth.

Distractions occur every day. Especially in the office. Recent surveys show that 80% of employees are interrupted more than 10 times every hour, with 44% saying they can’t count all of them. I ask you this: do these numbers reflect your own experience in the office? Chances are the answer is yes.

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