Despite what you may have been told, working for 10 hours straight is not as productive as working for 8 hours or less in 50-minute increments. While many employers are beginning to embrace the positive productivity benefits that breaks have, many employees are confusing distractions with breaks. One can help reenergize you for the next 50-minute work period, and the other will kidnap your focus and hold it for ransom for the next 23 minutes.

A recent study from the University of California Irvine found that, “about 82 percent of all interrupted work is resumed on the same day. But here’s the bad news—it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task.” These interruptions, or distractions, may seem like a welcome break when you’ve been concentrating on a brain-intensive project for over an hour but they’re actually more distracting than you may realize.

Instead of letting these disruptions and distractions act as your breaks you should actively schedule breaks throughout the day to keep your productivity levels high and help you be less susceptible to distracting conversations about last night’s big game or your weekend plans when you’re right in the middle of an important task.

While planned breaks are ideal, very few people have the luxury of commanding every moment of their time at work. Some distractions should be avoided at all cost but if the interruptions are minimal and automatic they may not hamper your productivity or steal your focus away for very long. According to the researchers, “if interruptions are short they’re usually not so bad. Imagine you’re working on this article and some one comes in and says, ‘Here, can you sign this form?’ You sign it, it’s a very subordinate kind of task and you go back to doing your work. Any kind of automatic task that doesn’t require a lot of thinking would not be a major disruption.” Therefore, if you’re going to be distracted, let yourself only be distracted by automatic tasks.

Another kind of distraction that can be detrimental to focus but shouldn’t cause the average 23 minute focus break is the kind of distraction that relates to what you’re currently working on. For example, say you’re developing a website and you’re working on some crucial back end functionality. If one of your coworkers comes up to you and wants to discuss some of the front-end functionality, it won’t be the end of the world. This was also proven by the University of California Irvine whose researchers found that, “if an interruption matches the topic of the current task at hand, then it’s beneficial. If you’re working on task A and somebody comes in and interrupts you about exactly that task people report that it’s very positive and helps them continue to think about task A.”

While breaks have been proven to positively affect productivity at work, distractions can often be confused for breaks. Ideally you will load your schedule with planned, well-dispersed breaks that will help you stay focused all day long. However, we don’t live in a perfect world and distractions will pop up. Do your best to resist them but if they’re automatic tasks or if they relate to what you’re working on, they won’t steal your focus for very long.