Being busy is perceived to be a good thing, a sign of success. The prevailing notion is that if you aren’t super busy, you aren’t important or hard working. The truth is, busyness makes you less productive. A recent study showed that switching what you’re doing mid-task to take care of something else increases the time it takes you to finish both tasks by 25 percent. Microsoft has also discovered that it takes people an average of 15 minutes to return to their projects every time they were interrupted by e-mails or phone calls.