You're interrupted every few minutes. Here's the fix.

Try this experiment tomorrow. Every time you switch what you're doing, whether because of a notification, an email, a text, or just your own itchy brain, make a tally mark on a sticky note.

I did this once, and by the time I went to lunch, I had to stop counting because it was so depressing.

If you're a business owner, your workday is probably a constant stream of small interruptions. Client messages. Team questions. Email pings. Slack. "Quick question" texts. Your own urge to check just one thing. Each one feels tiny. Together, they may be costing you far more than you think.

What the research says about interruptions

Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has spent decades studying how people actually work. In one early study of information workers, she and her colleagues found that people spent only a few minutes on a task before switching to something else, whether interrupted by someone or interrupting themselves. In a later experiment, published in 2008 with Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke, Mark studied what interruptions actually cost.

The finding surprised the researchers. People who were interrupted didn't finish their tasks more slowly. They finished them faster, and with no difference in quality. But it came at a price. The interrupted workers reported more stress, more frustration, more time pressure, and more effort.

In other words, interruptions don't necessarily make you slower. They make you work harder and feel worse to get the same result.

That means that interruptions don't just cost you time, they also cost you energy.

(You'll see a lot of dramatic statistics online about exactly how many minutes it takes to refocus after an interruption. Many of them are misquoted or missing context, so I'm not going to repeat them. The research above is enough to make the point.)

In another study published in Computers in Human Behavior, researchers Kostadin Kushlev and Elizabeth Dunn asked people to spend one week checking email only three times a day, and another week checking as often as they wanted. When they limited checking to a few times a day, people reported lower daily stress. Same email. Same work. Just checked less often, in batches.

This is where I think AI can make one of its biggest differences for small business owners.

Not by making each task faster, but by helping you batch the interruptions.

Here's how I think about it:

1. Let AI triage, so you don't have to. Instead of reacting to every message as it lands, use AI tools that can summarize your inbox or messages at set times: what's urgent, what needs a reply, what can wait. You check the summary twice a day instead of the inbox fifty times.

2. Draft replies in a batch. Set aside two short blocks a day for communication. Use AI to draft responses to routine messages, then review and send them all at once.

3. Capture instead of switching. When a thought or task pops into your head mid-focus, dump it into a capture tool and keep going. Let AI sort and organize it later, instead of switching tasks to handle it now.

4. Automate the repeat questions. If your team or clients ask the same questions over and over, turn your answers into a shared resource or an AI assistant they can check first. Fewer questions land on you.

The non-AI part matters just as much

AI can help, but it can't fix this alone. A few simple habits make the biggest difference:

• Turn off notifications for everything that isn't truly urgent. Almost nothing is.

• Set communication windows. Check messages at set times, and let clients and your team know when they can expect replies.

• Protect one focus block a day. Even 60 to 90 minutes of uninterrupted time can change your output.

• Notice your self-interruptions. Some of the most frequent interruptions are the ones we give ourselves. When you feel the itch to check something, pause and ask if it can wait.

One of my clients was in the habit of answering client texts within minutes, all day long, because she thought fast replies were good service. We switched her to three response windows a day and set up AI to summarize and draft replies. Her clients barely noticed. (Which leads me to an entirely different subject for another day)

She said it was the first time in years she ended her workday without needing to take migraine medicine.

You don't have to be reachable every minute

Most interruptions feel urgent in the moment and turn out not to be. The business rarely falls apart when you answer an hour later. But your focus, your energy, and your ability to do your best work? Those do fall apart when you're interrupted all day. So batch the noise. Let AI help you sort it. Protect your attention.

It's the most valuable thing you have.

If your days feel like an endless stream of interruptions, let's build a system to calm them down.

Studies to link: Mark, Gudith & Klocke (2008), "The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress" · Kushlev & Dunn (2015), "Checking email less frequently reduces stress," Computers in Human Behavior