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Welcome to the Interruption Economy

Ted Bauer
2 min readMay 11, 2022

That’s what we live in now, right?

Consider: The whole idea of people stopping by your desk/office and asking “Hey, got a minute?” costs the U.S. about $588 billion in lost productivity per year.

Consider: Many professionals report wanting nothing more than “uninterrupted work time.” Some call that “flow,” although admittedly “flow” feels like a buzzword. This is largely because the amount of stress emanating from work seems to be rising, and a lot of that is because people don’t know where the appropriate professional/personal boundary line is.

Consider: In this article on “how to spend less time on email” (that article is written 922 times per day somewhere in the world), they note that many white-collar professionals spend about 25.7% of their day on email. EMail is essentially worthless. It purports to convey information but mostly is a tool to reinforce hierarchy.

Consider: When you use email that much, it typically means you’re reacting to everything instead of being thoughtful about anything. It’s basically just a giant series of interruptions. Noise. And every time you get interrupted by a supposedly-urgent email ping, it takes your brain about 23 minutes to get back on track.

Consider: We have millions of digital tools and platforms these days, all of which ping all day…

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Ted Bauer
Ted Bauer

Written by Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.

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