Comment by didibus

Yes you read it correctly. It's the time of the "interruption" itself. From when you stopped working on your task to when you resumed working on it.

In that time away from your task you might have answered questions, worked another small task, relaxed, chit chatted, etc.

The time to refocus on the task once resumed wasn't measured, but participants said it was "very detrimental".

> Thus, people’s attention was directed to multiple other topics before resuming work. This was reported by informants as being very detrimental

So we don't exactly know how much time it took participants to get back to a focused state on their task, we just know the time they were away from it.

That's a great question and after rereading the quote I honestly couldn't tell.

After mentioning the time, they do talk about how it also takes time to return to work from an interruption. But on my read it seemed a bit ambiguous whether the time was from the interruption itself or from the combination of the interruption and the time after the interruption before you return to productive work.

The mystery seems pretty much "solved" to me.

We know where that number originated from, it's from this Gallup interview with Gloria Mark.

We also know the Gloria Mark paper corroborates the number:

> When people did resume work on the same day, it took an average length of time of 25 min. 26 sec (sd=54 min. 48 sec.).

From the Gloria Mark paper: https://ics.uci.edu/~gmark/CHI2005.pdf

Now we're only left guessing the discrepancy between her paper saying 25 minutes and 26 seconds and her quoting 23 minutes and 15 seconds when interviewed about it.

My guess is she didn't recall exactly and gave a ballpark as she remembered it.

The full interview is all in the link. But specifically the bad news was:

> But the bad news is, when you're interrupted, you don't immediately go back to the task you were doing before you were interrupted. There are about two intervening tasks before you go back to your original task, so it takes more effort to reorient back to the original task. Also, interruptions change the physical environment. For example, someone has asked you for information and you have opened new windows on your desktop, or people have given you papers that are now arranged on your desk. So often the physical layout of your environment has changed, and it's harder to reconstruct where you were. So there's a cognitive cost to an interruption.