Can you identify with this? You get to work and start checking emails. Halfway through writing an answer, you decide that you should have a cup of coffee. On the way to the coffee machine, a colleague asks if he can help review a report. The phone rings as he returns to his desk. While on the phone with the customer, they are alerted to three more emails. An hour later, you see your still empty cup in the coffee machine, you realize that your client’s file is on your colleague’s desk, you have no idea where the report is, and you still haven’t sent the email that started writing due to interruptions.

If you feel that distractions make it difficult for you to do and enjoy your work, you are right. Researchers have found that even small interruptions derail your thinking and increase errors. In one study, people performed a sequence-based procedure on a computer. Erik Altman and his team found that interruptions of just three seconds doubled the error rate. Other researchers found that distractions can increase the time it takes to complete a task by 20-40%.

The impact of office outages is now so great that we have outage investigators. Gloria Marks is one of them, and her team spent three days studying a group of office workers and timing everything they did. They found:

• The average time people spent on a task before being interrupted or switched was approximately three minutes.

• People interrupted themselves about 44% of the time; the rest of the interruptions came from outside sources.

• On average, it took 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the interrupted tasks, and most people performed two intermediate tasks before returning to the original task.

Not only do interruptions mean that homework takes longer, but we’re not as smart as we do. Alessandro Acquisiti examined how much brain power is lost if you are interrupted by a phone call or email. Participants were asked to read a short passage and answer questions about it. Participants who were interrupted performed 20% worse than those who were not.

Broken concentration can lead you to lose information, make mistakes, or alter the structure of the document you are preparing. Constant distractions can reduce the quality of advice you give, the quality of your meeting preparation, and your enjoyment of work. They can also make it difficult for you to find the necessary mental space for complex problems that may require detailed thinking and planning.

How Marshmallows Can Help

Given the number of disruptions in a modern legal workplace, is there anything you can do? You can train yourself not to give in to distractions in the same way that some of the kids at Stanford’s famous marshmallow did with their craving for a marshmallow.

In the experiment, young children were sitting at a table in front of a marshmallow and were told that they could do it now or that if they could wait until the researcher returned to the room, they would get a second marshmallow. Some ate the marshmallow right away. The rest tried to wait for the investigator to return to get a second marshmallow. Of those who tried to wait, only a third were successful and received a second marshmallow. Later in life, the children who waited became the most successful. They had better education, better paying jobs, a lower body mass index, better relationships, and tended not to have addictions or a criminal record.

Researchers in another study conducted in Dunedin, New Zealand, were surprised to find that a child’s level of self-control was as important as predicting their financial success and health later in life such as social class, wealth, family of origin, or intelligence quotient.

Are you a one or two marshmallow person at work?

When you hear an email alert, your phone tells you that a text message has arrived, or you overhear a conversation in a nearby office, it’s easy to want to immediately gratify yourself and find out what’s going on. If you stop concentrating on the report you are writing and immediately check the email, you would be showing the traits of a ‘marshmallow person’. If you could have the desire to find out what’s in the email until you’ve finished the report, you’d be displaying the traits of a ‘two-marshmallow person’. I’d finish the report sooner and make fewer mistakes.

Dealing with distractions in a work environment could be as simple as reminding yourself to be a ‘two marshmallow person’. This little act of personal discipline that will pay off.