How to Focus Better at Work: 16 Tips and What the Research Measured

What Mental Habits Help You Focus at Work?

Quick Answer: Write down distracting thoughts instead of chasing or dismissing them, stop multitasking and single-task instead, use the 10-minute commitment technique to overcome start resistance, and practice holding your attention on a single object to build concentration like a muscle.

Write down distracting thoughts. Even the most focused workers deal with distracting thoughts, a movie to look up, a grocery item to remember, a question to ask someone. Most people either chase the thought (losing focus on a tangent) or dismiss it (creating frustration). A better approach is to allow the thought, write it down, and move on. Writing it down brings closure to the thought and lets you return to it later without letting it derail your current focus.

Stop multitasking. Most professionals believe multitasking saves time. In reality, it compromises the quality and efficiency of every task you attempt simultaneously. Whether you are checking email during a meeting or working on a project while holding a conversation, learn to recognize when you are splitting your attention and stop. Try using one of these time blocking apps to protect dedicated focus periods for single tasks.

Commit to 10 minutes. Focus is much easier to sustain than it is to initiate. Starting a task is the hardest part. If you cannot focus, commit to just 10 minutes on the task. Ten minutes never feels like a long commitment, which makes it psychologically easier to begin. By the time the 10 minutes are up, you will have enough momentum that continuing feels natural. This technique is especially effective for tasks that feel overwhelming or uninteresting.

Practice holding your attention. Your ability to concentrate is like a muscle, the more you train it, the stronger it gets. You can practice by focusing intently on a simple object for a set period of time. If you are new to this, start with something easy: focus on the ticking second hand of a clock for one full minute. Gradually build to more challenging exercises, like focusing on a single point on a wall for five minutes. It may seem simple, but consistent practice measurably improves your ability to concentrate during actual work tasks.

What Environment Changes Eliminate Distractions and Improve Focus?

Quick Answer: Turn off notifications (the popular 23-minute recovery figure comes from a 2006 interview, while a measured email interruption cost 16 minutes and 33 seconds), minimize physical interruptions by changing your workspace, block distracting websites with browser add-ons, and use a productivity app to measure your focus over time.

Shut off notifications. It takes up to 23 minutes to fully recover focus after being distracted, according to research from the University of California, Irvine. Even a few-second notification disruption can result in a massive loss of productive time. Email alerts, instant messages, and project update notifications are constant sources of context switching. Turn notifications off entirely during focused work periods. If that is not possible, limit the number you receive and batch-check messages at set intervals instead.

Minimize interruptions. If you are trying to focus on a specific project, adjust your work environment so that interruptions are not possible. If colleagues frequently stop by your desk for questions or small talk, shut the door to your office or move to a private meeting room. If you work remotely, work from a dedicated home office rather than a noisy café. The goal is to create physical barriers between yourself and the most common sources of interruption.

Cut down on distracting websites. Most people are at least occasionally pulled into time-wasting websites like social media or news aggregators. You might click a bookmark without consciously deciding to, and spend several minutes browsing in the middle of a work assignment. To break the habit, remove the bookmarks, delete accounts you do not need, or install a browser add-on that limits your time on these sites to a few minutes per session.

Use an app to measure your focus. The first step in any focus improvement effort is establishing a way to measure your performance, what gets measured gets improved. There are a variety of productivity apps for focus and distraction elimination that track tasks completed, time spent on different activities, and overall output. Measuring your focus over time reveals whether your strategies are working and where you still need to improve.

How Does Understanding Your Mental Patterns Improve Focus?

Quick Answer: Identify your personal peak focus times and schedule demanding work during those periods. Pursue flow states by matching task difficulty and interest level. Experiment with individual approaches, the tactics that work best vary from person to person.

Understand and work with flow. Flow is a psychological state where you are so focused that time seems to disappear and your environment becomes irrelevant. Achieving flow produces your highest-quality, most concentrated work. Flow states occur at the intersection of difficulty and interest: if a task is too hard or too easy, you cannot focus on it properly; if a task is uninteresting, the same problem applies. Seek out work that genuinely interests you and is just challenging enough to sustain your attention. When you find that balance, you can move through tasks with sustained, unbroken focus.

Understand your focus fluctuations. Different people have different energy and concentration patterns throughout the day. Some are natural morning people; some peak in the afternoon or evening. Spend time observing your own patterns, then optimize your schedule around them. If you achieve peak focus in the middle of the afternoon, schedule your most important or intensive tasks for that window. If you are most distracted in the early morning, reserve that time for low-level, easy tasks that do not require deep concentration.

Find your individual approach. Everyone’s brain works differently. One person might achieve peak focus by waking early with a large cup of coffee and loud music, while another achieves similar results late in the afternoon in complete silence. Take time to experiment with different combinations of timing, environment, nutrition, and routine. You may be surprised to learn what actually boosts your focus versus what you assumed would help. The only way to confirm whether a strategy is working is to measure your performance over time. If you want to maximize your focus by understanding how you spend your time, learning how to make time go faster at work can also help you identify patterns in your most and least productive periods.

What Physical Health Practices Support Sustained Focus at Work?

Quick Answer: Eat a nutritious breakfast with lean protein and complex carbohydrates, snack on fruit or nuts between meals, get 7, 9 hours of sleep per night, exercise daily (ideally before work), and practice meditation or mindfulness to build mental discipline.

Eat a hearty breakfast. Focus is partially a byproduct of energy. If you feel tired, sluggish, or hungry, you will not be able to concentrate. One of the most effective ways to improve morning focus is to eat a robust, nutritious breakfast. Lean proteins like egg whites and complex carbohydrates like oatmeal provide sustained energy. If you drink coffee or tea, the caffeine provides an additional boost.

Snack throughout the day. Even a full breakfast will not sustain your energy all day. If you start feeling hungry a few hours after lunch, or in the gap between breakfast and lunch, your focus will drop. Plan ahead and prepare healthy snacks, a piece of fruit or a handful of nuts is often enough to restore peak concentration.

Get plenty of sleep. Insufficient sleep directly impairs concentration. Schedule 7 to 9 hours of sleep every night with the same priority you give to any other commitment. Go to bed and wake up at consistent times. If you have trouble falling or staying asleep, invest in a quality mattress, limit caffeine in the afternoon, and avoid screen time before bed.

Meditate. Concentration requires mental discipline, which you can develop through practice. Mindfulness and meditation require practitioners to focus on rhythmic breathing or another environmental anchor while blocking out all distractions for a set period. Practicing daily, even for just a few minutes, builds higher emotional resilience and a greater capacity to shut down distractions throughout the workday.

Exercise daily. Physical exercise relieves stress, clears your head, and makes you less easily distracted. In the immediate period after a workout, you experience a measurable boost in focus potential. Try to exercise before work or during your lunch break to position your sharpest concentration during working hours. If you practice daily, you will find yourself less distracted and less stressed overall.

The 23-Minute Recovery Figure Doesn’t Come From a Study

Almost every article about focus repeats that it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to a task after an interruption. That figure has never appeared in a peer-reviewed paper.

It comes from a 2006 interview. Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine gave it to the Gallup Business Journal in June 2006.

Mark told Gallup: “most interrupted work was resumed on the same day, 81.9 percent, and it was resumed, on average, in 23 minutes and 15 seconds.” She was describing a field study that shadowed 36 managers, analysts and developers for three days.

An earlier version of this article repeated that claim and cited the wrong paper for it. We have corrected it here and kept the original citation in place, because the paper is worth reading on its own terms.

The Paper Everyone Cites Found the Opposite of the Popular Claim

The study usually offered as the source is Mark, Gudith and Klocke, “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress,” published at CHI 2008. We read the full paper and searched it for the figure.

The number isn’t there. The paper is a laboratory experiment with 48 participants working a simulated email task, interrupted by phone and instant message.

Its finding runs the other way on speed. Interrupted participants finished faster, at 20.31 and 20.60 minutes against 22.77 minutes when uninterrupted.

What went up was the cost of getting there. The authors report higher stress, higher frustration and more time pressure in the interrupted conditions.

The Same Researcher Later Published a Different Number

In 2023, tied to her book on attention, Mark gave a University of California interview with a revised figure. She said it takes about 25 and a half minutes to pick up an interrupted project.

She also gave newer measurements in the same interview. Workers spend around 10.5 minutes on a project before switching, and the median device switch has fallen to 47 seconds from 75 seconds in 2012.

Two public figures from one researcher, neither in a peer-reviewed paper, and a published paper that found interrupted work went faster. Treat any exact resumption number you read as an estimate from field observation.

What the Interruption Research Measured, Study by Study

Study	Design and sample	What the authors found
Mark, Gudith and Klocke, CHI 2008	Lab experiment, 48 participants, simulated email task	The authors report interrupted work completed faster, at 20.31 and 20.60 minutes against 22.77, with higher stress and frustration
Iqbal and Horvitz, CHI 2007	Field log study, 27 users over two weeks, plus 14 interviews	The authors report 16 minutes 33 seconds of resumption time after an immediate response to an email alert
Mark, Voida and Cardello, CHI 2012	Email cut off for five workdays, 13 information workers, heart rate variability measured	The authors report less multitasking, longer task focus and lower stress without email
Leroy, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2009	Two experiments on switching between tasks	Leroy names the effect attention residue, where thinking about an unfinished task degrades performance on the next one
Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2001	Four experiments alternating classification and arithmetic tasks	The authors report time costs from switching that grew with rule complexity

One caveat on the last row. The widely quoted claim that task switching costs “as much as 40% of productive time” comes from later interviews rather than from that 2001 paper.

The Two Studies That Measured Email Specifically

Two papers isolate email rather than interruption in general. Both point the same way.

Iqbal and Horvitz logged 27 users at Microsoft Research over two weeks. Their CHI 2007 paper gives an exact number for the recovery cost of an email alert.

The authors write: “An immediate response to an email alert was associated with users taking, on average, 16 minutes and 33 seconds (S.D.=27m, 20s) in the resumption phase before returning to the state of the application in advance of the suspension.”

Mark, Voida and Cardello went further and removed email entirely. Their CHI 2012 study cut 13 information workers off from email for five workdays while recording heart rate variability.

The authors summarize it plainly: “without email, people multitasked less and had a longer task focus… stress, as measured by heart rate variability, was lower without email.”

Thirteen people is a small sample, and the authors say so. The result still matters, because it measured stress with a wearable instead of asking people how stressed they felt.

Find out how much email is landing on your own team before you change anything. One way is to count the emails each person sends and receives first.

A tactic aimed at the wrong volume fixes nothing.

Google and Microsoft Publish Focus Advice, and One of Them Repeats the Myth

Both vendors write about focus as well as shipping features for it. We went looking on the assumption that neither did, and both refuted it.

Google published “16 tips to help you be more focused and organized at work” on its official blog on 21 March 2023. The author, Julia Lee Harter, describes a timed sprint method by name.

Google’s own post says: “I set alarms for short working sprints. When I need an extra push, I ask Google to set a 25 minute-alarm and take a five-minute break when it goes off. After four of these intervals, I take a longer break.”

Google’s Workspace Learning Center carries a second piece of guidance. Its tips for managing time in Calendar include a dedicated section on scheduling focus time to reduce distractions.

Microsoft publishes focus writing too, on its Microsoft 365 blog and its Life Hacks pages. One of those posts repeats the 23-minute figure and attributes it to a magazine rather than to a study.

That is worth naming. A vendor’s own blog is where a lot of readers meet the number, and the citation trail there stops at a secondary source.

Google Documents Focus Time Creation on Desktop Only

Google Calendar’s focus time feature has a documented platform gap. We read all three platform tabs of Google’s help page for it.

The Desktop tab gives the full creation workflow. The Android and iOS tabs contain only instructions for editing or deleting a focus time event.

Google states it directly on both mobile tabs: “Important: To edit or delete a focus time event from your mobile device, you must first create the event on a computer.”

Gmail’s Nudges feature has no such gap. Google documents the same two toggles, “Suggest emails to reply to” and “Suggest emails to follow up on,” on Desktop, Android and iOS alike.

Viva Insights Focus Plan: What Microsoft Names and What It Leaves Out

Microsoft’s focus plan books one to four hours of calendar time a day and sets Teams status to Do Not Disturb. Microsoft names the exact licences it needs, which vendors often don’t. If you’re managing other people rather than only yourself, we’ve collected what managers can change to improve employee productivity, with the evidence behind each one.

Feature	Licence Microsoft names
Focus plan, the recurring automatic booking	Microsoft requires Insights by MyAnalytics on Office 365 E1, E3, A1 or A3, or MyAnalytics Full on E5, plus a Viva Insights subscription
Book a non-recurring focus session	Microsoft requires only an active Exchange Online account, with no Viva Insights service plan
Quiet time	Microsoft requires only an active Exchange Online account, with no Viva Insights service plan
Any published effect on productivity	Microsoft publishes no number. We checked four Microsoft pages and found no measured effect stated anywhere

That last row is the interesting one. Microsoft will tell you precisely which licence to buy and nothing about what the feature achieves.

Does the Pomodoro Technique Have Evidence Behind It?

Yes, though less than its popularity suggests, and not from an office setting. The best available evidence is a 2025 scoping review in BMC Medical Education by Ogut.

That review screened 6,499 records and included 32 studies covering 5,270 participants. Three of those were randomized controlled trials with 87 participants between them.

The review reports: “Across three RCTs (n=87), structured Pomodoro intervals (24 min work/6 min break; 12 min work/3 min break) led to approximately 20% lower fatigue, a 0.5-point improvement in distractibility, and a 0.4-point increase in motivation compared to self-paced break schedules.”

Read the setting before you generalize. Every included study sits in anatomy and medical education, with students revising material rather than knowledge workers doing knowledge work.

We searched for a controlled trial of the technique in an office or knowledge-work setting and found none. Use the method if the rhythm suits you, and don’t cite it as proven for your job.

What the Vendors Document About Focus, and What They Don’t

Question	Status	What the vendor publishes
Does Google publish written focus advice?	Documented	Google published a 16-tip focus post on its official blog on 21 March 2023 and covers focus time in the Workspace Learning Center
Can you create Google Calendar focus time on a phone?	Not documented	Google’s Android and iOS tabs cover editing and deleting only, and say you must first create the event on a computer
Does Microsoft name the licence for focus plan?	Documented	Microsoft names Insights by MyAnalytics or MyAnalytics Full plus a Viva Insights subscription on its environment requirements page
Does Microsoft publish a measured effect for focus plan?	Not documented	We checked four Microsoft pages covering focus plan, quiet time and time management, and none states a measured effect
Does Gmail document how many days trigger a nudge?	Not documented	We checked four Google pages and none names a day threshold for the Suggest emails to follow up on toggle
Does either vendor publish an email interruption cost?	Not documented	Neither publishes one. The 16 minutes 33 seconds figure comes from a Microsoft Research paper rather than from product documentation

Frequently Asked Questions About Focusing at Work

How long does it take to regain focus after a distraction?

The widely quoted figure of up to 23 minutes comes from a 2006 Gallup interview with Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine. It does not appear in the linked CHI 2008 paper.

That paper is a 48-person laboratory experiment, and it found interrupted work finished faster at 20.31 and 20.60 minutes against 22.77 minutes. Turning off notifications still helps, and the measured cost of an email alert is 16 minutes and 33 seconds.

What is flow state and how does it improve focus at work?

Flow is a psychological state of complete immersion in a task where time seems to disappear. It occurs at the intersection of difficulty and interest, the task must be challenging enough to sustain attention and genuinely interesting. Achieving flow consistently produces your highest-quality, most focused work.

Does multitasking help you get more done at work?

No. Multitasking compromises both the quality and speed of every task you attempt simultaneously. Single-tasking, giving one task your full attention, consistently produces better results. Time blocking apps can help you protect dedicated single-task focus periods.

How does sleep affect your ability to focus at work?

Insufficient sleep directly impairs concentration. Schedule 7 to 9 hours per night, maintain consistent sleep and wake times, limit afternoon caffeine, and avoid screen time before bed. Better sleep translates directly to stronger focus during working hours.

How does meditation improve focus at work?

Mindfulness and meditation train the mental discipline required for sustained concentration. Practicing daily, even for just a few minutes, builds emotional resilience and strengthens your capacity to block out distractions throughout the workday.

What is the 10-minute focus technique?

The 10-minute technique lowers the psychological barrier to starting a task. Since focus is easier to sustain than initiate, committing to just 10 minutes makes it easier to begin. By the time the 10 minutes are up, most people have enough momentum to continue working.

What foods help you focus at work?

A nutritious breakfast with lean protein (egg whites) and complex carbohydrates (oatmeal) provides sustained morning energy. Coffee or tea adds a caffeine boost. Between meals, healthy snacks like fruit or nuts prevent the energy crashes that destroy concentration.

How does exercise improve focus at work?

Daily exercise relieves stress, clears your head, and makes you less easily distracted. You experience a measurable focus boost immediately after a workout, so exercising before work or during lunch positions your sharpest concentration during working hours.

Where does the 23-minute focus recovery figure come from?

It comes from a June 2006 Gallup Business Journal interview with Gloria Mark, describing a field study of 36 workers. The figure doesn’t appear in the CHI 2008 paper usually cited for it.

Mark gave a revised figure of 25 and a half minutes in a 2023 University of California interview.

How long does an email interruption cost you?

Iqbal and Horvitz measured 16 minutes and 33 seconds of resumption time after an immediate response to an email alert. That figure comes from a CHI 2007 field study of 27 users logged over two weeks.

Does turning email off improve focus?

A CHI 2012 study by Mark, Voida and Cardello cut 13 information workers off from email for five workdays. The authors report less multitasking, longer task focus and lower stress measured through heart rate variability.

Is the Pomodoro Technique proven to work?

Three randomized controlled trials totaling 87 participants found around 20% lower fatigue with structured intervals, per a 2025 scoping review in BMC Medical Education. Every included study sits in medical education, and we found no controlled trial in an office setting.

Do Google or Microsoft publish focus guidance?

Yes. Google published a 16-tip focus post on its official blog in March 2023 and covers scheduling focus time in the Workspace Learning Center. Microsoft publishes focus writing on its Microsoft 365 blog and documents Viva Insights focus plan.