Distraction Cost Calculator: How Much Time Interruptions Really Cost You

Count the times you get pulled off task in a typical work day and this estimates the focused hours it costs you each week and year. The figure leans on Gloria Mark's research finding that it takes an average of around 23 minutes to return to the same depth of focus after an interruption.

This is an upper estimate, not a stopwatch reading. Not every interruption costs a full reset; a glance at a clock is not the same as a ten minute Slack thread. The point is the scale: even a handful of deep interruptions a day adds up to whole working days lost over a year. Halving them is usually easier than finding more hours.