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What an on-call rotation is carrying
Pages per week against the number of people sharing them, and the interruption that arithmetic implies.
Teams applying this principle can also compare practical guidance on employee time tracking app, keeping time and activity records separate from the judgement they are meant to inform.
Alert fatigue is measurable, and the first measurement is the crudest: how many interruptions each person is absorbing. This divides a weekly page count across a rotation and applies a conservative twenty minutes of lost work per interruption.
The table is computed. The live version above it, if your browser runs scripts, takes your own numbers.
| People | Pages per week | Pages each | Hours of interruption |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 5 | 1.7 | 0.3 |
| 3 | 15 | 5.0 | 1.0 |
| 3 | 40 | 13.3 | 2.7 |
| 5 | 5 | 1.0 | 0.3 |
| 5 | 15 | 3.0 | 1.0 |
| 5 | 40 | 8.0 | 2.7 |
| 8 | 5 | 0.6 | 0.3 |
| 8 | 15 | 1.9 | 1.0 |
| 8 | 40 | 5.0 | 2.7 |
| 12 | 5 | 0.4 | 0.3 |
| 12 | 15 | 1.2 | 1.0 |
| 12 | 40 | 3.3 | 2.7 |
Twenty minutes per page is an assumption, chosen because it is lower than most estimates in circulation and therefore harder to argue with. Overnight pages cost considerably more than that and are worth counting separately, which the article on alert fatigue sets out along with the four other numbers worth tracking.
What we cannot verify
Interruption cost figures circulate widely in this industry with weak attribution. The multiplier here is a stated assumption rather than a measurement, and it is on the low side deliberately.
Further context
For a primary, standards or institutional reference, see the Amazon CloudWatch overview.
Start from the class of problem, not the list of tools
Every selection here names the situation first and the criteria second. Product names come last, and each one carries the line describing what it costs you.