Time Confetti: How Small Distractions Steal Your Rest and Focus

Photo by Monique Carrati on Unsplash

A few weeks back on a Monday, I noticed something familiar: I didn’t feel like I’d had a well-rested weekend. When I tried to pinpoint why, I came up blank. There were no major time sinks — just two personal errands, about three hours each, on Saturday and Sunday.

I even have a practice of keeping my laptop aside on weekends. So what was it then?

Time Confetti.

Have you seen those party poppers full of confetti — tiny, sparkly pieces of paper you can never fully clean up, no matter how hard you try? That’s exactly what I was doing with my time: shredding it into little pieces.

The term time confetti was coined by Brigid Schulte. She describes it as “tiny chunks of time here and there, in the form of minutes and seconds, lost to non-productive multitasking.”

We often set out to relax, but the pings, notifications, and mundane obligations add up until, suddenly, all of our “me time” is gone.

Now, I’ve already disabled mail and WhatsApp notifications on my phone. But last weekend, after my LinkedIn post offering 10 gift sessions got a great response, I added a few more slots. And then I kept checking my email — to see who signed up and to learn a little more about the humans I’d soon get to have a coaching conversation with.

It didn’t feel like I was doing anything. Just a few WhatsApp chats, a quick email scan here and there. Each glance only took seconds. But together? Easily a couple of hours. (Schulte and Ashley Whillans note that we tend to underestimate how much time these small moments really add up to.)

The bigger impact, though, wasn’t the total time lost. It was how these interruptions fragmented my leisure hours. Because they were scattered randomly throughout, I never got uninterrupted rest. And as research shows, context-switching drains energy. So instead of feeling refreshed, I ended up feeling depleted.

Writing this newsletter, I noticed the same pattern: I squeezed in small tasks between paragraphs. That’s when it hit me — time confetti shows up not only in rest, but also in focused work.

It felt almost ironic, since I’ve hosted virtual co-working sessions designed specifically for deep, focused work. Clients often share how hard it is to carve out time for long-term thinking because “quick things” keep popping up: someone stops by for a chat, a WhatsApp check leads to handling another task, and so on.

At work, this makes me wonder if we should treat our breaks as sacred too. Instead of slipping in a Slack reply or a “quick” chat, what if we allowed ourselves a true break?

My resolve now: Just as I’ve created defined windows for checking email and WhatsApp on weekdays, I’m going to try applying the same practice on weekends. Emails I can manage. WhatsApp will be trickier — but maybe I can at least keep my phone aside when I want a focused break.

For You to Reflect: Where in your life do you notice creating time confetti? And how does it affect your ability to gather the shreds of time back together?

P.S. Mindfulness — even while doing something mundane, or nothing at all — might just be the bonus antidote to time confetti.

If you’d like to read more from me like this directly in your inbox, you can head here to subscribe to my newsletter.