[paper] The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress

From CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 5-10, 2008 · Florence, Italy

Paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/1357054.1357072

We performed an empirical study to investigate whether thecontext of interruptions makes a difference. We found thatcontext does not make a difference but surprisingly, people completed interrupted tasks in less time with no differencein quality. Our data suggests that people compensate forinterruptions by working faster, but this comes at a price:experiencing more stress, higher frustration, time pressureand effort. Individual differences exist in the managementof interruptions: personality measures of openness toexperience and need for personal structure predict disruption costs of interruptions. We discuss implicationsfor how system design can support interrupted work

Also kind of a related tool: Interruptions impact on deep work simulator