Most MSPs don’t think of interruptions as “work.”
A Teams message asking for a quick opinion.
A phone call to double-check something.
A teammate pulling you into a side conversation to unblock an issue.
None of these feel like real tasks. They’re small. They’re fast. They’re part of being responsive.
But interruptions are one of the largest sources of untracked work inside MSPs.
Every interruption forces a technician to pause what they’re doing, shift context, and rebuild focus later. Even when the interruption itself only takes a minute or two, the recovery cost is much higher. Research on knowledge work consistently shows it can take fifteen to twenty minutes to fully re-enter a complex task after being interrupted.
In MSP environments where interruptions are frequent, that cost compounds quickly.
Tickets take longer to resolve. Documentation gets rushed. Root causes are skipped in favor of quick fixes. Preventative work is pushed aside because there’s never a clean block of time to focus.
And because interruptions rarely get logged, leadership never sees their impact. Ticket metrics remain stable. SLAs stay green. Capacity looks fine.
From the inside, teams feel constantly behind.
Interruptions aren’t a discipline problem. They’re a visibility problem.
This is just one category of invisible work. The white paper The Work Breaking Your MSP breaks down where untracked work comes from, and how to make it visible without micromanagement.
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