What do you think happens to your productivity when your boss butts in to ask you questions, or when a coworker needs a file? Many people assume interruptions slow them down and hurt the quality of their work. But research shows it’s just not true.

Little interruptions actually cause people to work faster. More importantly, the quality of their work remains uncompromised.

In two companion studies, workers in a simulated office environment were asked to edit text while they were interrupted at different rates by researchers. The subjects didn’t know that the interruptions were a part of the study, so the researchers made the interruptions seem relevant to the task. Much to the researchers’ surprise, subjects who were interrupted completed their work faster than a control group, and their finished products were just as good. The fact that the text editing was chosen as the task is significant, because it reflects real-world work that requires concentration to do well.

The researchers believe that when workers are aware of interruptions that could potentially slow them down, they develop strategies to compensate or even overcompensate.

Little interruptions actually cause people to work faster. More importantly, the quality of their work remains uncompromised.

A different group of researchers had a hunch that if interruptions were unrelated to the task at hand, the outcomes might be different. But they were wrong.

In their experiment, subjects had to reply to emails with information that they could look up in a documents that they were provided. Like text editing, answering emails is a representative office task that requires focus. One group faced interruptions that were related to the task at hand, while another group faced completely irrelevant interruptions. A third control group carried out the same assignment without any interruptions. The two groups that were interrupted finished their work faster than the control group, regardless of the nature of the interruptions. The control subjects took on average two minutes longer to complete a roughly 20-minute assignment.

The research team also wondered whether the emails from the interrupted groups might have gotten snippy or sloppy, assuming that people become frustrated and reckless when they’re constantly interrupted while trying to work. Nope! Just as with the text-editing study, the quality of the work remained high. Typos, length of email, and politeness were steady across all three groups.