Employees who always immediately reply to messages on your team communication app are less productive than those who eliminate digital distractions to actually focus on their tasks. While this kind of responsiveness is often mistaken for high productivity and commitment to the company, it actually reduces output and increases costs.

  • Constant digital responsiveness impairs the brain’s ability to maintain focus and ignore distractions.
  • Knowledge workers spend so much time communicating, they don’t have enough time for their core tasks, forcing them to log in late at night for focused work overtime.
  • True focus requires methodical task adherence — a proactive approach to eliminating sources of distractions before they can reach you.
  • For task adherence to work, you’ll need both behavioral buffers (time blocking strategies for focused solo work) and technological buffers (things like pause notification features) to ward off distractions.

It all comes down to context switching

The human brain is like a single-core CPU — it can only process one thing at a time. And, just like a single-core CPU, the brain can create the illusion of multitasking by rapidly switching between tasks in a process known as context switching.

At the workplace, context switching doesn’t just happen when you try to multitask. It also happens during quick and seemingly inconsequential activities like:

  • Scanning a push notification to judge if it’s worth replying to immediately, or 
  • Opening a new tool and switching UIs.

Except for a statistical minority known as supertaskers — between 2% and 2.5% of the population — every instance of context switching causes a delay in task execution. And these delays add up to a massive financial leak.

Studies show that knowledge workers switch tools roughly 1,200 times a day, with 65% of these switches being followed by another switch just 11 seconds later. Over the course of a month, this adds up to 4 hours spent on just refocusing after tool switching. 

And, while switching tools causes a delay, it’s nothing compared to the 23 minutes needed to refocus after a distraction. This is the cost that responsive employees pay each time they entertain a distraction. 

To put this in perspective, if an employee making $50/hour spends just 2 hours on distractions, that’s $100 a day, $500 a week, and $26,000 a year wasted on refocusing. And given that the average employee gets 153 team chat app messages every workday, 2 hours of distractions is a highly conservative estimate! 

So, unless an employee’s primary responsibility at work is to communicate, stopping what you’re doing to quickly reply to all messages is counterproductive.

Does exposure to context switching make employees more efficient at it?

No, exposure to context switching doesn’t make employees more efficient at it. In fact, quite the opposite happens. 

Studies have shown that chronic media multitaskers — which perfectly describes the responsive employee who keeps their team communication app open on a second monitor — have reduced grey matter in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC). Among other things, this part of the brain is responsible for decision-making, focusing on a single task, and ignoring distractions. 

By exposing yourself to distractions, you’re not training your brain to ignore them. You’re instead training it to get distracted more easily, making it harder to stay focused through a process that physically shrinks your brain.

So, even when you need employees to be reachable and responsive, those who generally block out distractions will still perform better.

Knowledge workers are communicating more than they can afford

As communication tools get better, we spend more time communicating. But the core roles and responsibilities of most knowledge workers aren’t to communicate — they’ve got tasks to do. Solo tasks that benefit from focus and suffer from distractions. And because excessive time is spent on communication, there’s just not enough time left for actually doing your job. 

Microsoft telemetry data shows that, during 9 to 5, employees get interrupted every 2 minutes by messages, emails, or meetings, adding up to 275 interruptions a day. And everyone feels this — approximately half of all employees (48%) and leaders (52%) feel that their work is fragmented and chaotic.

The data backs this up, with 80% of the global workforce saying they don’t have enough time or energy to do their work, despite 53% of leaders saying that productivity needs to increase.

What happens in cases where excessive communication prevents workers from finishing their tasks is that either:

  • Their output suffers because they can’t fit everything into an 8-hour work shift, or 
  • Their private life suffers, because they have to work overtime. 

Before 9 and after 5 — the workday has no beginning or end

The situation with overtime caused by excessive communication has gotten so bad that data analysts have noticed what they refer to as the third peak of productivity — a period around 9 p.m. when knowledge workers log back in to actually get some work done free from meetings and other interruptions.

And while this may work in the short-term, logging back in late at night is a recipe for disaster in the long run, as this third peak of productivity leads to increased stress levels among on-site and hybrid workers.

And the workday doesn’t just end late, it also starts before you even get out of bed in the morning. The fact that 40% of employees who are online at 6 a.m. review their emails at this time is proof of that. The average worker gets 117 emails daily, and even if you take just half 15 seconds to skin through every one, that’s half an hour gone on skimming emails.

So, how do you fix this?

The solution to counterproductive responsiveness is task adherence

The term task adherence refers to how aggressively you work to shield yourself from interruptions before they even have a chance to affect you. We can distinguish among three types of task adherence.

Task adherence typeDefinitionWorkplace exampleCognitive cost
Low task adherenceLeaving communication channels open and reacting to messages in real time.Keeping a team chat application open on a secondary monitor.High: The brain has to redirect power to evaluate incoming messages, even if the worker doesn’t fully stop work on the main task.
Medium task adherenceWorking in isolated time blocks while checking communication channels on a set schedule.Working uninterrupted for a set period (45 minutes, an hour and a half, etc.), then checking and replying to messages for a set period, and repeating the cycle.Moderate: Context switching still occurs, but the employee reduces its negative effects by controlling the schedule.
High task adherenceEliminating all physical and digital possibilities of being reached during long focus windows.Actively enabling Do Not Disturb modes, closing email tabs, putting the smartphone away in a drawer, and working in an isolated room.Zero: Interruption signals never reach the worker, which means that the brain wastes no energy deciding whether to ignore them or not.

A lot of employees tolerate constant distractions because they don’t want to be seen as rude or uncooperative. Or, they’ve learned that management rewards responsiveness that comes at the expense of productivity and punishes productivity that comes at the expense of responsiveness. 

For true focus to flourish, you’ll need to promote a culture of medium or high task adherence. Leadership and management must get on board with the idea of rewarding focused productivity and deep work. This means blocking out time for personal tasks and checking in on the team communication app at scheduled times. What these blocks will look like is up to you and your teams to decide on.

Behavioral buffers aren’t enough — you also need technological buffers

Relying on willpower to fight off distractions is a losing battle. In a world of push notifications, true focus requires tools. 

But tools, themselves, are often the cause of context switching. So what’s the fix? 

For team communication tools, the solution is to optimize their use. For example, I use Pumble by CAKE.com, which lets me pause notifications for a set period. I can even make a custom status and add an emoji, so when I’m trying to focus, my colleagues see something like 💻 In the zone until 12:45 PM. This creates clarity and transparency around communications without hurting productivity, since my coworkers know when they’ll be able to reach me.

This kind of task adherence will plug up the productivity leaks that are quietly increasing your company costs by shifting the company culture from always on to intentionally present.

How we reviewed this post: Our writers & editors monitor the posts and update them when new information becomes available, to keep them fresh and relevant.