Every office has one. An employee that loves to waste other people's time.

It's the person who must tell you how they'll be spending their vacation time five months from now, or share some other mind numbing piece of information like the current temp in Bogota Colombia at the moment.

I hate to say it, but every time that bonehead comes up and distracts you, you immediately become 20% dumber according to a new study out of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. What's worse, you will stay that way as long as you're distracted.

Now I'm not saying you permanently turn into a drooling, sputtering, hello I'm Brick Tamlin from Anchorman with an IQ of a corn muffin dumb. You just become a distracted kind of dumb.

Once you have slipped into that distracted dumb state, it can take almost half an hour to fully focus again.

As long as we're on the subject of distractions, another study found that the average office worker gets 11 minutes of work done between interruptions.

Based on that math, you may never be able to get back to a place of full productivity ever again!

I hope my math is right. I just got interrupted while writing this, so I'm currently 20% dumber right now.

 

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