For many office workers, March means hours spent surreptitiously watching college basketball games and obsessively checking in on brackets. Even if you're not a March Madness fan, we all have our own workday distractions. (The Olympics, anyone?) Even when there’s nothing major going on, with Slack, an unrelenting news cycle, and open offices, getting through an entire workday without some kind of distraction is pretty much impossible.

For the easily distracted—which is all of us, right?—we have some great news: not all distractions are bad. Gloria Mark, an informatics researcher at UC Irvine, studies workplace interruptions and her research has found that being distracted doesn’t necessarily destroy productivity. You’re welcome.

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