Switching between apps draining 10 weeks of productivity per year: Slack study

tech.hindustantimes.com:

In today’s world, there’s an app for everything. And while having best-of-breed apps to get work done is handy, too many can make people a lot less productive. In fact, the amount of time employees spend just switching between apps should be a wake-up call for Indian organisations to radically rethink how their people are working.

According to a new Slack study, The Reinvention of Work — based on a survey of more than 2,000 Indian knowledge workers in companies with over 100 employees — hustling from app to app has put a significant strain on employees. The research found respondents were, on average, switching between 10 apps a day, while 1 in 10 knowledge workers were juggling over 20 apps daily.

The impact of this really comes down to productivity and time lost. Most workers, according to the study, were wasting around four hours a week (47 minutes a day) simply moving back and forth between the apps they need to do their jobs. For one in five, that number is even higher, spending up to 10 hours a week, which equates to a staggering 10 working weeks a year. If every employee in a workforce of 100 was wasting 10 weeks of productivity per year, that would become an enormous area of inefficiency for a business — one that would demand action.

Bringing apps into one place brings back productivity

As Indian organisations start formalising their hybrid working arrangements — turning what was a short-term fix into a long-term strategy — they need to take a good look at their technology stack and prioritise setting their teams up for efficient collaboration, both internally and externally.

Many apps hold an integral function for a business, so the problem is less the number of apps that are being used, rather how those apps are