The Financial times has one article ("Warning: interruption overload") on the prevalence of interruptions for knowledge workers:

"The profusion of communications channels is definitely harmful for productivity, because it leads to more interruptions," says Jakob Nielsen, an expert on information technology usability. "For people doing knowledge work - the most highly paid employees - every time you are interrupted it takes 5-15 minutes to fully recapture your train of thought and get back to being completely immersed in your main task."

There is a growing body of research to support this view. When Basex, a New York-based IT research company, conducted a study on the effects of interruptions on 1,000 office workers, it found that they spent an average of 2.1 hours a day dealing with interruptions (including the time taken to "recover" afterwards).

More recently, the same company (Basex) covered by The New York Times affirms that information overload will be the Problem of the Year in 2008. In the last year, there have been a plethora of applications dealing with time management and todo lists. It really looks like people are painfully aware of the problem, and trying to design solutions to cope with information overload. Still, it’s an unsolved problem. Whoever finds an easy, generalized solution, will have a huge success.

This, as many projects, started as myself trying to solve my own problem: Where did my day go? Why don’t I get more done? How long can I work in a state of flow without before an interruption pops out?

After frenetic activity, you look back at your day and it doesn’t look like you accomplished much. I also felt I was being interrupted too much for my own good,… and sometimes, the sources of those interruptions was myself, checking mail, browsing websites ‘to rest’ (and not coming back to my main task for over 20 minutes when It was supposed to be a 3 minutes rest), or doing some other unrelated tasks. I really wanted to know how often I’m interrupted, and there wasn’t a tool out there that felt right (which is difficult considering the trillions of productivity-enhancing programs being pitched out there!). So I just designed one myself.

Have a look, go to the interruptron page, and tell me what you think….