I found this article by Cyrus Foroughi via @JelleJolles and sure is an important read on how distractions kill the quality of what you write. In fact, it’s again proof against multitasking (and open offices actually):

“In our study just published in the journal Human Factors, we conducted two experiments to test the hypothesis that interruptions harm quality. In the first experiment, we asked participants to outline and write three different essays. Participants were either interrupted while outlining, while writing, or not at all (as the control). Both the outlining and writing phases were 12 minutes each, and participants served in all three conditions. The essay prompts came from a stock bank from the College Board for use in the SAT.

How much do interruptions damage quality?

In the interruption conditions, participants were interrupted three separate times for 60 seconds each and asked to complete math problems. Importantly, when participants lost time to interruptions, they got to make up that time after the interruption; this ensured that every participant had the same amount of total time to work on the essay, regardless of condition. Two independent graders who had no other affiliation with the study and were blind to the conditions evaluated all essays using the College Board Essay Scoring Guide.

We found that interruptions in either the outlining or writing phase significantly reduced the quality of the essays — by approximately half a point. Additionally, when interrupted while writing, the word counts of the essays were significantly lower than those from the control group. However, the word count did not change when the interruptions occurred while outlining even though the quality was reduced. This finding suggests that two different causes may be reducing the quality, and we are continuing to explore those causes now.”
(read more here)