The four hours a week you spend finding your own stuff
Office workers switch apps about 1,200 times a day and lose nearly four hours a week getting their bearings back. What that looks like in a small business.
Out there
In August 2022, three researchers writing for Harvard Business Review did something most productivity studies skip. They put software on 137 people's computers across 20 teams at three large companies, and for five weeks they counted every time someone switched between applications or windows.
The average person did it about 1,200 times a day. Each switch cost a little over two seconds to get their bearings back. That adds up to just under four hours a week, about 9 percent of a working year, spent re-finding the place they were just at. One person switched more than 3,600 times a day. That's once every eight seconds for an entire shift, and a mouse that has seen things.
Gartner asked the question the other way around. In a survey of 4,861 workers in late 2022, 47 percent said they struggle to find the information they need to do their jobs, and the average desk worker used 11 applications, up from six in 2019. A smaller vendor survey from January 2026 puts the search time at 3.2 hours a week and says only one internal search in ten finds the answer on the first try. Take that one with the salt a vendor survey deserves, but notice the number hasn't moved.
Those are big-company numbers. A small business has fewer apps. It also has fewer people, so when the estimate lives in one place, the deposit in another, the photos in a text thread and the change the customer asked for in somebody's head, there's nobody to absorb the gap. It's you, at nine at night, reconstructing what you promised.
Nine percent of a working year is about five weeks. Call it a month and change, every year, spent finding your own stuff.
In here
The question that eats the four hours is a phone call. A customer asks, "Where are we on my job?"
Here's what answering that looks like in most shops. The quote is in one app. The change they asked for is in an email. The photo of the problem is in a text thread. The install date is on a calendar. Whether the parts came in is in a spreadsheet, or in Dave's head, and Dave is on a roof. Five places, five times finding your bearings, and the customer is on hold while you do it. The 1,200 switches are mostly that: the hunt across apps for one answer.
Nexus is built to kill the hunt. Open the customer, and their jobs are on that page, along with the last time anyone talked to them. Open the job, and everything under it is there: the agreement it's under, the tasks and who's on them, the notes, the files, the photo. Search runs across all of it. Ctrl+K jumps to any record from anywhere. Every project gets its own notebook the day it's created, so the meeting notes sit next to the work. "Where are we on my job?" is one screen, and you answer it while they're still on the line.
You'll still switch to email, to your accounting software, to whatever you draw in. Nexus isn't those and shouldn't try to be. The switches that stay are one hop out and one hop back to a record that's where you left it. The switches that go are the ones where you were hunting. Gartner's 47 percent who struggle to find what they need are describing the hunt. That's the four hours, and that's the part that comes back.
What to do Monday
No homework. One stopwatch.
The next time a customer asks where things stand, start the clock when they ask and stop it when you've answered. Count the places you opened on the way. That's the whole exercise, and it's the only number in this post that's yours.
One place and under a minute: you're fine, and I mean that. Five places and ten minutes: that's the four hours, one call at a time, and it's what Nexus is for. The beta opens Monday, October 19, and costs nothing to join: nerthos.com/beta.
Sources
- Rohan Narayana Murty, Sandeep Dadlani and Rajath B. Das, How Much Time and Energy Does Context Switching Take?, Harvard Business Review, August 2022. Five-week study of 137 users across 20 teams at three Fortune 500 companies. Summarized by Canadian Underwriter, August 31, 2022.
- Gartner, Survey Reveals 47% of Digital Workers Struggle to Find the Information Needed to Effectively Perform Their Jobs, press release, May 10, 2023. 4,861 workers at organizations of 100 or more employees, surveyed September to November 2022.
- Slite, Enterprise Search Survey Report 2026, January 25, 2026. About 100 knowledge workers; Slite sells a search product.