Fact · Dictation for work and study
In a controlled experiment, people who were interrupted finished tasks sooner with no difference in quality, but they compensated by working faster and reported more stress, frustration, time pressure and effort.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“people compensate for interruptions by working faster, but this comes at a price: experiencing more stress, higher frustration, time pressure and effort”
The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress, Gloria Mark et al., Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), 2008, Abstract.
Open the original- What it measures
- Participants wrote a set of office tasks, including email replies, in a laboratory. Some were interrupted at scheduled intervals by a telephone call or an instant message.
- What it does not show
- A lab experiment with scheduled interruptions, not a field study of real offices. It measures the cost of interruption to the worker, not how long dictation takes.