Keep a Distraction Log Before You Change Anything

Dr. Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, observed information workers at their jobs and recorded their interruptions. She reports that people interrupted themselves about as often as something outside them did (Mark, 2023). That matters for anyone trying to focus better, because the usual fixes, such as turning off notifications or closing the door, only reach the interruptions that come from outside.

A distraction starts outside you or inside you.

External distractions arrive on their own, such as a notification or a coworker stopping by your desk. They are usually the easiest to reduce, because you can change your settings and your surroundings so that fewer of them reach you.

Internal distractions start with you. Nothing around you changed, and you switched anyway, perhaps to check email or to go back over a worry. Blocking apps does less for these. If a blocker stops you from opening one website, you may find yourself opening your inbox or tidying your desk instead.

A switch can cost more than the seconds it takes.

Sophie Leroy, a professor of management at the University of Washington Bothell, gave university students a word puzzle and then a second task, evaluating job candidates from their résumés. Students who had not finished the puzzle showed more signs of still thinking about it, and in her second experiment they did worse on the résumé task. She called this attention residue: part of your attention stays on the task you left (Leroy, 2009).

Interruptions can also raise stress. Mark and her colleagues Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke conducted a laboratory study in which participants answered sets of work emails, and in some sets a “supervisor” interrupted about every two minutes. When they were interrupted, participants worked faster and made no more errors. They also rated their stress, frustration, time pressure and effort higher (Mark, Gudith & Klocke, 2008). In this study, getting the work done did not show that the interruptions had no cost, because the cost appeared in how stressed people felt.

The feeling just before the switch is worth writing down.

Many internal distractions may be a way out of an uncomfortable moment, such as boredom or not knowing the next step. Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable, makes this argument (Eyal, 2019). None of the studies above tested it, so treat it as something to check against your own record. If your record shows you switch when you are stuck, a phone blocker will not tell you where to start, and deciding on one small first step before you begin is more likely to help.

How to keep the log for seven days.

During your two or three most important work blocks each day, keep an index card next to you. Paper works better than your phone, because opening the phone to log a distraction can start another one. Each time you notice you have been pulled off task, take about ten seconds to write four things:

1. Time: roughly when it happened.
2. Source: E if something interrupted you, I if you interrupted yourself.
3. What: a word or two, such as phone, email, coworker, snack or worry.
4. Feeling before: one word, such as bored, stuck, anxious, tired or fine. If you did not notice a feeling, write “missed.”

Keeping the log may cut your distractions for a while, simply because you are watching them, so expect your counts to be a little lower than in a week when you are not tracking.

The one thing to do.

At the end of the week, count your Es and Is, and find the feeling that appears most often before a switch. If most entries are E, change your settings and surroundings first. If most are I, plan for the feeling that comes before the switch, for example by deciding your first step before you sit down, instead of relying on a blocker alone.

The complete audit adds a daily energy rating and a few other checks. It is Worksheet 4 in Focused: Reclaiming Attention in a World Built to Distract You, along with the chapters to read for each result. See Focused on Amazon.

What this does not show.

The attention-residue and interruption studies were short laboratory tasks, mostly with university students, so how large these costs are across a real workday is not known. Stress in the email study came from participants’ own ratings after a single session. Mark’s finding about self-interruptions comes from observing particular groups of information workers, and your own balance may be different. The idea that distractions often relieve an uncomfortable feeling is an argument that has not been tested directly.