Concentrating, especially after spending several decades with habits that impair attention span such as the use of screens and the millions of distractions behind it, can be difficult. And doing it again after being interrupted, even more and it is worse in certain cases, such as in front of a PC screen, in which the time necessary to resume what one was doing is not measured in seconds, but in minutes. Different studies agree that, after a major interruption, a person needs around 23 minutes to return to the same level of concentration. And in the case of professionals who work with complex information or deep cognitive tasks – such as programmers, analysts or writers – that time skyrockets.
An analysis published by Game Developer Magazine examined 10,000 work sessions of 86 programmers and surveyed more than 400 software professionals. The conclusion was clear: developers waste more time than other workers when resuming their activity after an interruption. In fact, They take up to 15 minutes just to re-edit code after an interruptionand just a 10% resume the task in less than a minute.
Why is this happening? The key is in the call cognitive load. When we work on something that requires keeping multiple mental variables active – a software architecture, mathematical reasoning, the structure of a complex article – any interruption forces us out of that mental state. Restoring it is not immediate, since the brain needs time to reconstruct the context and return to the exact point where it was.. And the transition from a high memory load state to a low one already takes time, approximately seven minutes according to the study.
The situation worsens when interruptions are planned, such as meetings scheduled in the middle of the afternoon. For those who need long blocks of focused work, a meeting in the middle of the day can fragment the day into sections that are too short to tackle demanding tasks. And that anticipatory psychological effect – knowing that something will interrupt your rhythm – discourages starting ambitious work even before the interruption arrives.
That is why many professionals choose to work at marginal times such as late at nightlooking for that silence that is rarely found during working hours. However, this strategy has a clear cost in the quality of rest and, in the medium term, in the risk of exhaustion. Sustained productivity cannot be based on sacrificing sleep.
The solution is not simple, but it is known. Work blocks that require deep concentration must be protected, notifications reduced, meetings grouped and spaces normalized without interruptions. In a technologically saturated environment, Concentration is a rare and valuable resource. And understand that getting back to it takes time –sometimes half an hour for each call, message or touch on the shoulder– changes the perception of those small interruptions that, added together, can turn an entire day into a series of false starts.