How much time do people lose switching between apps at work?
About 3 to 4 hours a week goes to getting back on track after switching apps. Logging software (just under 4 hours) and self-reports (36 minutes a day) agree within about an hour.
- Medium confidence
- 2 primary sources
- 2021 to 2022
- Last checked
Every study on one scale
Chart values as text
- Scale: hours a week lost after switching. Shaded range: 3–4 h.
- Murty et al., HBR (2022): just under 4 h (9%)
- Qatalog / Cornell (2021): 36 min a day (3 h)
Why medium confidence: Two independent studies, one logged and one self-reported, agree within about an hour. Counts of switches per day differ by a factor of 50 between sources, so they are kept out of the range.
Sources
| Study | Creator | Year | Sample | Method | Figure | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| How Much Time and Energy Do We Waste Toggling Between Applications? (Harvard Business Review) | Rohan Narayana Murty, Sandeep Dadlani and Rajath B. Das (Soroco) | 2022 | 137 users in 20 teams at three Fortune 500 companies | Logging software for up to five weeks, observed. Soroco sells work-pattern software. | About 1,200 toggles a day; just under 4 hours a week reorienting, about 9% of time at work “just under four hours a week reorienting themselves after toggling” | hbr.org ↗ |
| Workgeist Report '21 | Qatalog with Cornell University's Ellis Idea Lab | 2021 | Three surveys of about 1,000 remote workers each, US and UK | Online surveys, March 2021, self-reported. Qatalog sells a work hub. | 36 minutes a day switching between apps; 9.5 minutes to get back into a good workflow “taking 9 and a half minutes on average to get back into a good workflow” | qatalog.com ↗ Archived copy ↗ Qatalog is now part of ClickUp and no longer hosts the report; the archived copy is the original PDF. |
How many times a day do people switch between apps?
It depends on who counts. People report about 25 switches a day between 10 apps (Asana, 2021). Logging software records far more: 391 to 661 window switches a day (Mark and colleagues, 2014) and about 1,200 toggles between apps and websites (Harvard Business Review, 2022). Self-reported counts are likely too low.
| Study | Creator | Year | Sample | Method | Figure | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anatomy of Work Index 2021 | Asana, survey by Sapio Research | 2021 | 13,123 knowledge workers in seven countries | Online survey, October 2020, self-reported | 10 apps and 25 switches between them a day (US: 13 apps, 30 switches) “on average people switch between 10 apps 25 times per day” | asana.com ↗ Archived copy ↗ Archived copy of the full 2021 report PDF. |
| Bored Mondays and Focused Afternoons (ACM CHI 2014) | Gloria Mark, Shamsi Iqbal, Mary Czerwinski and Paul Johns | 2014 | 32 information workers at one US company, 5 days each | Logging software plus experience sampling, observed. Peer-reviewed. | 661 window switches a day on Mondays, 391 on Fridays | dl.acm.org ↗ Archived copy ↗ |
How many apps does a knowledge worker use in a day?
About 9 to 10, self-reported: 10 in Asana's 2021 survey and 9 in 2022, with 13 in the US. Companies deploy far more: Okta's customers average 101 apps each, and 74 in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
| Study | Creator | Year | Sample | Method | Figure | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anatomy of Work Index 2022 | Asana, survey by GWI | 2022 | 10,624 knowledge workers in seven countries | Online survey, October 2021, self-reported | 9 apps a day, down from 10 “workers are using slightly fewer apps per day (9) than last year (10)” | businesswire.com ↗ Archived copy ↗ |
| Businesses at Work 2025 | Okta | 2025 | Anonymized data from thousands of Okta customers | Apps connected per company in Okta's network, 2024 data. A company-level count. | 101 apps per company on average; 74 in Europe, the Middle East and Africa “The average number of apps each company uses reached 101 this year” | okta.com ↗ |
Numbers you may have seen
These figures circulate widely. Here is what the original source says.
- It takes 23 minutes 15 seconds to refocus after switching apps. That figure comes from research on interruptions, and it measures the time until people return to interrupted work. See F-04.
- The average person toggles more than 3,600 times a day. We found no study behind it. The largest logged count we found is about 1,200 toggles a day (HBR, 2022).
- Slack: workers switch between 10 or more apps a day and lose nearly 100 minutes. It appears on a Slack product page citing unnamed research. We could not find the study.
More from Where the Week Goes
- F-0119–25%How much of the work week do knowledge workers spend searching for information?
- F-0253–61%How much of the work day goes to coordinating work rather than doing it?
- F-033–18 hHow many hours a week do people spend in meetings, and how much of it is wasted?
- F-0420–26 minHow long does it take to get back to a task after an interruption?
- F-0513–28%How much of the work week do knowledge workers spend on email and chat?
- F-074.6–5.7 hHow much time do people spend redoing work that already exists?
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