Why the interrupt-driven workday is an operating-system problem - not an attention problem

For much of my career, responsiveness felt like leadership.

As a product and engineering leader, I wanted people to know they could reach me. If a team was blocked, a customer issue surfaced, or an executive needed context, I would jump in. Being the person who could quickly absorb a problem and move it forward felt useful because, in many cases, it was.

But there was a point when being responsive stopped supporting the work and started determining it. My day was no longer organized around what mattered most. It was organized around what had arrived most recently: the newest message, the next meeting, the latest escalation, the question someone needed answered before they could continue.

An interrupt-driven organization does not work from priorities. It works from arrivals.

While building Earmark, we heard the same pattern in our discovery conversations with product managers and product leaders. People would begin the week with a clear set of priorities, then watch those priorities disappear beneath meetings, messages, requests, and follow-ups. Their job became keeping the organization moving one interruption at a time.

This is usually described as a distraction problem. Turn off notifications. Close Slack. Protect your calendar. Those tactics can help, but they place responsibility on the person receiving the interruptions while leaving the system creating them unchanged. The deeper problem is not that people have forgotten how to concentrate. It is that we have designed work so almost anything can interrupt almost anything else.

The workday has become a request queue

In a healthy operating system, urgency is exceptional. Work is prioritized, context travels with the request, and people can distinguish what needs attention now from what can wait. In an interrupt-driven system, every channel competes for immediacy. A direct message looks urgent because it is direct. A meeting looks important because it occupies the calendar. The signal is not the importance of the work. The signal is that someone has asked.

Research from UC Irvine professor Gloria Mark helps show how completely this rhythm has reshaped attention. In a 2023 interview published by UC Irvine, Mark explained that people working on screens spend an average of just 47 seconds on one screen before shifting their attention. When attention leaves a project, it can take roughly 25 minutes to return because one interruption often leads into several other activities.

You answer one question, check the document referenced in the thread, respond to someone else, and arrive back at the original task with less time and a partially reconstructed understanding of where you left off.

The interruption may last a few seconds. The recovery belongs to the task.

Responsiveness can quietly replace judgment

Product management is especially vulnerable because the role sits between so many functions. Engineering needs clarification. Design needs feedback. Sales needs an answer for a prospect. Support needs customer context. Leadership needs an update. Every request can be legitimate and take only a few minutes. In aggregate, a PM can spend the entire day being genuinely helpful without advancing the product’s most important question.

This creates a dangerous illusion. Responsiveness is visible; judgment often is not. Quick answers, attended meetings, and status updates leave evidence that work happened. Thinking through whether the team is solving the right problem is harder to see and easier to interrupt.

Over time, the organization rewards availability more reliably than insight. People who answer quickly appear engaged; people protecting time to think can appear unavailable. The behaviors needed to keep the system responsive crowd out those needed to make it intelligent.

Responsiveness feels like leadership right up until it replaces judgment.

This became clear during Earmark’s discovery. Product leaders did not want to become less collaborative. They wanted to stop functioning as the organization’s manual routing layer—receiving context from one group, translating it for another, and answering the same question in several forms.

Interruptions change the quality of the work

The cost is not limited to the time required to resume a task. Interruptions can change the quality and emotional experience of the work itself.

In their ACM study, “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress”, Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke found that people compensated for interruptions by working faster. They still completed the assigned work, but experienced greater stress, frustration, time pressure, and effort.

Other research shows how little disruption it can take to affect accuracy. A Michigan State University study of procedural work found that after interruptions, participants were more likely to resume at the wrong step. The effect was particularly interesting among experienced participants: as they became faster at the task, they became less accurate after being interrupted.

Even an unanswered notification can be enough. A Florida State University study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance found that receiving a phone notification disrupted performance on an attention-demanding task, even when participants did not interact with the phone.

Knowledge work is not identical to a laboratory task or clinical procedure. But the warning travels well: resuming after an interruption requires reconstructing state, and that reconstruction is imperfect. For product teams, the lost state is often the nuance that matters most—the tradeoff behind a requirement, the reason a request was deprioritized, or the uncertainty beneath a decision that otherwise looks complete.

The PM becomes the integration layer

Most product organizations have separate systems for communication and execution. Conversation happens in meetings, Slack, email, and calls. Work is expected to appear later in Jira, Linear, Notion, Confluence, or a stakeholder update.

Between those systems sits a person.

The PM listens, interprets, documents, reframes, assigns, and follows up. When context is missing downstream, someone interrupts the PM to recover it. When an engineering conversation needs to be explained to an executive, the PM translates it again.

The person with the most context becomes the person everyone has to interrupt.

This is an architectural consequence of systems that capture conversation without completing its transition into usable work.

The first generation of AI meeting tools improved the record. Transcripts became searchable, summaries automatic, and action items easier to identify. But a larger archive can create its own demand for attention. Someone must still review the output, decide what matters, move it into the right system, and answer what the record did not resolve.

If AI only produces more things for people to read, verify, route, and act upon, it adds intelligence to the interruption rather than removing the need for it.

Focus is not a personal benefit to negotiate

There is a tendency to treat focused time as an accommodation for people who prefer quiet. It is closer to production capacity. Teams need uninterrupted attention to reason through complexity, evaluate evidence, and make decisions that will survive contact with reality. That capacity cannot depend entirely on each employee’s ability to defend it.

The World Health Organization’s guidance on mental health at work identifies excessive workload or pace, long or inflexible hours, and lack of control over job design or workload as psychosocial risks. Its recommendations emphasize organizational interventions that change working conditions—not simply asking individuals to become more resilient inside the same conditions.

The same principle applies here. Notification settings are personal. Interruptibility is organizational. If every workflow assumes immediate access to someone’s attention, individual discipline cannot repair the system.

You cannot mindfulness your way out of a company that treats attention as an unlimited shared resource.

Resolve the interruption before it reaches a person

Our thinking about Earmark changed as we understood this. Giving product managers a faster way to process every interruption would only make them a more efficient integration layer while preserving the role the system had forced them to play.

The better question was how many interruptions should require a person in the first place.

If a stakeholder needs the latest decision, the decision should already be available with its rationale. If engineering needs requirements from a product discussion, the requirements should be ready to review. If leadership needs a status update, the relevant meetings and artifacts should be capable of producing it without someone reconstructing the week from memory.

That is what compels us to build Earmark: not a better inbox for meeting output, but a work layer that turns conversation into decisions, requirements, updates, and action while the context is alive. People should remain responsible for judgment, not repeatedly retrieve and repackage information the organization already created.

The best interruption is the one the workflow resolves before it reaches a person.

Work should be directed by intent

There will always be legitimate interruptions. Customers have emergencies, priorities change, and new information invalidates old plans. A company that cannot redirect attention when reality changes is not focused; it is rigid.

But redirection should be a choice, not the default behavior of the workday.

The standard we are working toward at Earmark is a day in which people are responsive because the situation deserves it-not because every system is competing for immediate attention. Conversations should produce durable context. Routine questions should be answerable without finding the person who remembers. Work should move without someone manually translating every step.

The goal is not a silent workplace. It is a workplace where attention follows intent.

Because when everything can interrupt you, the organization has not created more urgency. It has lost the ability to decide what matters.

Sources

• Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke, “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress”, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2008.

• University of California, Irvine, “If you can’t pay attention, you’re not alone”, May 5, 2023.

• Michigan State University, “Skilled workers more prone to mistakes when interrupted”, March 17, 2017.

• Cary Stothart, Ainsley Mitchum, and Courtney Yehnert, “The Attentional Cost of Receiving a Cell Phone Notification”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2015.

• World Health Organization, “Mental health at work”, September 2, 2024.