You lose up to 25 minutes every time you respond to an e-mail

Everyone talks about the vagaries of multi-tasking and how focusing on more than one thing at a time makes office workers both less productive and less happy with their work.

A 2007 study from Microsoft elucidates this concept by establishing just how much time people lose when they are interrupted by email and instant message alerts, two of the most common causes of office multi-tasking.

Microsoft used tracking software on 27 consenting employees over a two-week span to see how they shifted between applications after receiving an alert from Microsoft's Outlook email program, MSN messenger, Windows Messenger, or Microsoft Office Communicator.

What the company found was that the employees spent on average nearly 10 minutes switching to email or instant messenger after receiving an alert.

On top of that, they spent an additional 10 to 15 minutes on other diversions — responding to other emails, opening up new web pages, and the like — before getting back to the task they had been working on prior to receiving the alert.

This means that in total, workers stopped what they were doing for an average of 20 to 25 minutes every time they responded to an instant message or email alert. Sometimes, the disruptions took even longer.

Microsoft reports that 27 per cent of the time one of the employees received an alert, they did not get back to the original task for more than two hours, instead choosing to move on to other work.

In interviews with the researchers who performed the study, employees said their longest delays happened when they forgot the context in which they had been working.

For instance, if an employee was midway through preparing a presentation, they might have to go back and re-read what they had originally written to remember what they needed to write next.