The Toggle Tax
As I scroll past my collection of unread emails introducing me to the latest AI tool I’ve been granted access to, I push down the bubble of guilt that’s been building. Someone jumped through hoops to get me a license to this tool that a team spent weeks or months proving was valid and valuable. And yet I just can’t bring myself to set aside the time to start over with yet another platform.
These days every tool promises to make me a more efficient worker, boosting my productivity and revolutionizing how I spend my time. I’m told I’ll be left behind if I don’t learn how to incorporate AI into every workflow. I’m expected to have not only opinions but expertise on how to prompt effectively in each platform. Instead, I’m feeling overwhelmed, I’m tired, I’m not sure I’ve got the capacity to incorporate another.
Is there something wrong with me? Am I about to be left behind? Or is there something to my silent, personal rebellion against the growing armory at my disposal?
Research in 2022 from the Harvard Business Review found that on average workers were toggling between applications over 1,200 times per day, costing roughly four hours of productive time per week1. I can’t imagine this has gotten better over the last 4 years as we’ve continued to grow the number of tools we’re toggling between.
As it turns out, the exhaustion I’m feeling through my toggle marathon, isn’t personal weakness. There’s research on cognitive residue, fatigue, and increased stress that results from this type of context switching1. We’ve all heard that multitasking is something we should avoid, for me this feels like a variation on that theme.
A professor from the University of California, Irvine, demonstrated through her research on attention span that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to the same level of focus after a significant interruption2. Another study reported that 45% of workers said that toggling between too many apps makes them less productive, and 43% reported that it’s mentally exhausting to constantly switch between tools and contexts3.
We continue to adopt these tools in an attempt to reduce chaos, but they can also contribute to distribution, fragmentation, and their own invisible workload. How much time do you spend looking for a document or trying to remember which platform your boss used to share the latest update? According to research from RingCentral, not only do workers report switching between communication apps 10 times per hour, two-thirds of them say they waste up to 60 minutes at work navigating between apps, while 17% waste more than 60 minutes4.
The push for more interconnected tool sets, like common productivity apps’ incorporation of chats, documents, AI tools, calls, and notes into one platform, feels like further validation of this on a corporate level. Tech vendors know adoption tends to suffer along with productivity when we have to pivot repeatedly to access what we need. They’ve made huge strides in addressing the issue over the last handful of years, and developments still pop up that excite me.
This week, a new add-in popped up in a couple of my most used desktop applications that had me jumping to play with new capabilities. I wasn’t disappointed. With time, I’m hopeful that the companies making these tools will continue to build solutions that combat the challenges of disconnected apps and frequent toggling.
In my search for the right path forward I’ve done some side-by-side comparison between tools. My colleague and I used one of our initiatives this winter to plug in similar or even identical prompts/projects across two generative AI tools and compared the results. We were aiming to improve the process and capability while navigating different levels of access among our colleagues, which required us to work in BOTH platforms. We consistently found the insights more… insightful… on one of these platforms and I’ve fully indexed my use accordingly. While this wasn’t our intended outcome, it has made a significant impact on how, when, and where I choose to use generative AI.
As we optimize for efficiency one tool at a time, we’re creating chaos in aggregate. Like so many things in life, I think it comes down to finding balance. For me, picking one tool that I am comfortable with, and which helps me provide more extensive, in depth, and valuable insights across daily tasks is working better than maintaining surface-level familiarity across a collection of tools. I may be the only person you know who has said “no” to an offer for access to one of the most popular enterprise generative AI tools, but I feel confident in my choice as I develop comfort and competency with the tool I’ve selected instead.
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Haley Gove Lamb | Manager, Account & Client Engagement | Office of the CTO
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