Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at UC Irvine, ran one of the most cited studies in attention research by doing something simple: she had observers shadow office workers all day and log every interruption. The number that came out of it has since become a kind of universal reference point — after a digital interruption, it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully return to what you were doing before. Not seconds. Not a couple minutes. Twenty-three.
It's worse than "getting distracted for a bit"
Her follow-up work found people don't even go straight back to the original task — there are usually two other tasks completed in between before you return to what you were actually doing. A single notification doesn't cost you the ten seconds it takes to read it. It costs you a chain reaction of context-switching that can eat the better part of half an hour, and it costs you measurably more stress and cognitive load along the way.
Willpower was never the right tool for this
Nobody consciously decides to lose 23 minutes over a text notification. The interruption doesn't ask permission — it just happens, and the recovery cost happens whether you wanted it or not. That's the flaw in most "just have more discipline" advice about phone use: discipline operates at the moment of decision, and by the time there's a decision to make, the notification has already fired and the attention has already fractured.
Why Appblox is built around removing the option, not resisting it
This is the actual argument for scheduled, category-level blocking instead of willpower. If the notification never has a chance to land during a block, there's no moment of temptation to resist and no 23-minute recovery to pay for. Appblox isn't betting on you being strong enough to ignore your phone. It's removing the decision point entirely for the hours you've already decided matter — which, per the research, is worth a lot more than it sounds like on paper.