It's 9.20am and your coffee is starting to work, you're typing away and feeling focused and productive.
But then a message flashes at the bottom of your screen, taking you away from your work momentarily.
Suddenly, your focus is gone. You think to yourself, 'What was I just working on?'
According to new research, moments like this are eating up 40 minutes a day of productivity.
Besides the distractions, the expectation to be constantly connected to work is a major cause of burnout.
So how do we regain our focus and set boundaries in a hyper-connected world?
The cost of distracting work messages
A recent report by Economist Impact, based on a survey of knowledge workers from around the world, found that chat messages were the top workplace distraction.
"Of the distractions studied, chat messages at work tended to cause the greatest losses in focus time — 157 hours annually per knowledge worker on average across the ten countries," the report says.
About 60 per cent of knowledge workers in Australia felt pressured to respond straight away and be available all the time.
Meanwhile, 42 per cent of workers said they could not spend more than an hour on productive work without being interrupted.
Libby Sander is an assistant professor of organisational behaviour at Bond University. She says our brain only has a limited capacity for deep focus and can get drained.
"A lot of what we need to do in modern knowledge work is deep focused, concentrated work," Dr Sander says.
"If we're not actively taking steps to insulate ourselves from distractions, it has a huge effect."
Dr Sander says it takes 15-20 minutes to get focus back on the task after a distraction in the workplace.
The difficulties in switching off
Dr Sander says workplaces need to rethink all the communication platforms being used.
"People say to me they are on 17 different platforms they have to monitor during the day," she says.
"It's not feasible for us to do that effectively and be able to concentrate on our work."
Dr Sander says to work productively, workers need to switch off.
"Turn your phone off, turn notifications off your phone, remove pop up notifications," she says.
"That used to be the gold standard but then we had the pandemic and all of a sudden there's 17 platforms pinging you at the same time.
"My advice to organisations is to reduce the number of platforms people are using. There shouldn't be an expectation that they are on all of the time."
Finding focus in a distracting world
Some workplaces have recognised these modern distractions and have introduced a concept known as "deep focus time".
Rachel Clements is the director of psychological services at the Centre for Corporate Health and Resilia and says some managers may not be aware their workers are struggling with focus.
She suggests pointing out how you like to work when you've got certain tasks or deadlines, how long you'll be offline and what the benefits are.
"Give an assurance that when you come back online at a certain time, you'll be able to respond to emails and calls," she says.
She advises making the focus time transparent by emailing people to let them know and by blocking it out in your diary and sticking to it.
"If you get good at doing it and it becomes accepted in your culture, people will start to respect it," she says.
"If you are on a task where you need deep thought work, it's impossible when you're getting calls and chat interruptions."
Why you need 'mindful gaps' between meetings
Ms Clements says workers are "meeting stacked" with multiple back-to-back appointments — and it's bad for the brain.
"I have people tell me that they don't have time to reset mentally from meeting to meeting," she says.
"We need to build in micro recovery breaks so you can make sure your prefrontal cortex has recovered. It's not designed to be living and working like this."
Ms Clements says workers need to put "mindful gaps" in diaries to take a breath, have a drink break and gather their thoughts before the next meeting.
"It's an intentional reset, but you need to create the space to do it. It doesn't exist unless you're putting mindful gaps in the diary," she says.
Constant connectivity and burnout
While many workers have benefited from additional flexibility in post-pandemic workplaces, they haven't been able to shake the feeling of needing to be always available online.
"The over-arching consequence of this is our inability to put up boundaries and switch off and carve out recovery time," Ms Clements says.
"Around this time of the year, we see incredible levels of burnout because we have not been able to reconcile this."
Ms Clements says it's good to have "psychological bookmarks", or rituals, to start and end the working day with clear boundaries.
That might be getting a morning coffee to mark the start of work, rather than checking emails in bed.
Marking the end of the working day could be something simple like taking the dog for a walk.
"Your brain needs something active and intentional to switch off, even if it's only 10 minutes," she says.
"[Technology has] been a wonderful asset in many ways but now we've become too hyper-connected to work and people cannot switch off.
"How we are living isn't sustainable."
ABC Everyday in your inbox
Get our newsletter for the best of ABC Everyday each week