Why every work interruption costs you 23 minutes—and how to change it

You are working on a complex investment agreement. You are fully focused, reviewing clauses and checking every detail. Then—the phone rings. A prospective client asking about legal fees. The call lasts three minutes. You return to the document and… what were you doing? Where did you leave off?

If you think the cost of that interruption is only those three minutes on the call, here is the surprising part: research suggests you lose an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds.

The multitasking myth in the legal profession

For years, business culture told us multitasking is a future-proof skill. Yet research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience—including work associated with the American Psychological Association—shows that the human brain did not evolve to multitask in the way we imagine.

What we casually call multitasking is really rapid, repeated switching between tasks. Each switch carries a price: the so-called switch cost.

Psychology professor Anthony Sali, in studies using functional MRI, found that when you stop drafting a legal opinion to take a call, your frontal and parietal cortices must abruptly shift to abandon ongoing processes and adapt to the new situation. That neurological “disconnect” and “reconnect” to a new task can consume up to 40% of productive time.