The toggling tax: what app switching really costs your team

What the research found

In 2022, researchers Rohan Narayana Murty, Sandeep Dadlani and Rajath B. Das studied 20 teams, 137 people in all, across three Fortune 500 companies for up to five weeks. They published the results in Harvard Business Review. The average person switched between apps and websites about 1,200 times a day.

Each switch costs only a little over two seconds to get reoriented. Multiplied across a day, that came to just under four hours a week, which the authors put at about five working weeks a year, or 9% of annual time at work.

Why switching hurts more than the seconds suggest

The seconds are the visible part. The authors point to research on context switching showing that jumping between tasks is mentally taxing, and they note that people often move on again within seconds of arriving in an app. Work gets done in short, broken bursts.

Switching is also a symptom of a bigger pattern. Asana's Anatomy of Work Index 2021, a survey of more than 13,000 knowledge workers, found that people spent about 60% of their time on work about work: searching for information, switching between apps and sitting in status meetings. Only about a quarter went to the skilled work they were hired to do.

Where your team pays the tax

• Copying between systems. Moving a registration into the CRM, then into the invoice, then into the newsletter list.
• Hunting for the latest version. Which spreadsheet, which thread, which folder?
• Status updates. Asking, answering and re-asking where something stands.
• Logging in to check one thing. Opening a whole app to confirm a payment or a date.

Five ways to cut the toggling tax

1. Count the tools per job

Pick your three most common jobs, like onboarding a customer or running an event, and count how many apps each one touches. Any job that touches more than three is a candidate for consolidation. Our guide to cutting SaaS spend walks through the mapping.

2. Give everyone one home screen

People should start the day in one place that shows what needs them first: decisions, deadlines and open work, pulled from the tools underneath. In Mission Control that is the Flight Deck.

3. Bring information to the person

Instead of opening four apps to answer "did they pay?", put the answer where the question is asked. Connected data beats more tabs.

4. Hand the swivel-chair work to agents

The HBR authors describe people acting as the glue between apps. That glue work is exactly what software agents are good at: moving a record, drafting the follow-up, updating the status. Keep a person in charge of anything that sends, charges, signs, publishes or deletes. Here's how that approval step works.

5. Measure it before and after

Ask a few people to count app switches for one ordinary job, before and after a change. It is a simple, honest measure, and it keeps the conversation about the work, not the tools.

Where Mission Control fits

Mission Control puts your team, tools, apps, data and an AI crew in one place, so fewer jobs need a switch at all. Our first customer, the Enterprise Technology Association (ETA), reports 10 to 20 hours a week back per team member.