It's easy to feel like interruptions are no big deal — you only looked away for a second. The research says otherwise: the expensive part isn't the interruption, it's getting back.
In plain terms. Decades of attention research find that interruptions and constant task-switching carry a real, measurable cost — in time lost returning to work, in shrinking spans of focus, and in errors. Naya is built for that cost: it holds the context around what you were doing so coming back is cheaper.
The numbers
What gets lost to interruption.
~23 minutes
to get back to an interrupted task. In Gloria Mark's field studies of office workers, interrupted tasks that were resumed the same day took on average 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to — usually after handling about two other tasks in between. (It's the time to resume, not 23 minutes of pure refocusing.)
is the average time people now spend on any one screen before switching their attention — down from about 2½ minutes in 2004. Our spans of focus at the computer have been shrinking for two decades.
of productive time can be lost to the mental blocks created by repeatedly switching between tasks — psychologist David Meyer's estimate of how small per-switch costs add up across a day.
from even a brief interruption. In a controlled study, interruptions averaging just 2.8 seconds doubled the rate of sequence errors — losing your place in a series of steps — and ~4.4-second interruptions tripled it.
When you switch tasks, your focus doesn't fully come with you. Researcher Sophie Leroy named this attention residue: a piece of your mind stays stuck on the task you just left — especially if it was unfinished — leaving fewer cognitive resources for what's in front of you.
That's why the return is the expensive part. The work waited for you; the context didn't. You have to rebuild it — what you were deciding, why it mattered, where you meant to go next — before you can really begin again.
Naya can't stop the interruptions — life will keep arriving. What it can do is hold the context around what you were doing, so the 23-minute climb back becomes a step back in. You return to the thread, not a blank screen.
It comes from Gloria Mark's field research and refers to the average time before an interrupted task was resumed the same day — typically after two other tasks in between. It's often misquoted as "23 minutes to refocus after every distraction," which overstates it. The honest version: getting back to interrupted work takes far longer than the interruption itself.
Does Naya prevent interruptions?
No. Life still interrupts. Naya lowers the cost of coming back by holding the context around your work, rather than pretending you can avoid being pulled away.
Where do these numbers come from?
Each figure links to its source — peer-reviewed research and the researchers' own statements (Gloria Mark at UC Irvine, the American Psychological Association, Sophie Leroy, and Altmann, Trafton & Hambrick). We've used the conservative, defensible framing of each.
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