Intercept the Interruption
Mark my place, handle this, come back.
When interrupted during focused work, don't respond immediately. Instead: (1) Write one word that captures where you are in the current task. (2) Then turn to the interruption. (3) When it's handled, look at your one-word bookmark and resume. This takes three seconds and saves twenty-three minutes.
Someone or something breaks into your focused work and requires an immediate response.
The interruption is trivial enough to wave off entirely without engaging.
Why it works
Without a bookmark, an interruption forces a complete context rebuild when you return. A single-word anchor preserves enough state to skip the re-entry tax.
After a single interruption, it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully return to the original task. The interruption itself might take 30 seconds, but the real cost is context destruction and the rebuild afterward. Your brain doesn’t have a ‘pause and resume’ button — when context breaks, it reconstructs the entire working state from scratch. The one-word bookmark exploits how memory works: a single vivid cue can reactivate an entire cognitive context, the same way a smell brings back a complete memory. You’re not saving the whole state. You’re leaving a retrieval hook. Three seconds of bookmarking saves twenty-three minutes of rebuilding.