How Many Productivity and Office Apps Do You Really Need?
It’s a paradox, but too many productivity software and apps, in fact, will kill your efficiency. The reason for that is quite obvious — when you start multitasking, you lose focus. When you lose focus, you do less, and when you do less, you get fewer results.
So, let’s find out how many useful apps one should have to keep off the line between managing your life and work and managing your apps. ;)
Surveys Prove That Too Many Apps May Be Inefficient
Pegasystems studied almost 5 million hours of work of support teams and discovered that on average they use 35 apps and switch between them more than 1100 times each day! They perform nearly 134 copy-paste actions per day and transfer the information from one app to another. Of course, due to this, they often lose focus, which results in nearly 850 keyboard errors every day.
These numbers speak for themselves — people can’t stay focused, when they need to do monotonous work all the time.
Slack and GlobalWebIndex conducted one more research on this topic and found out that a great number of apps really hinders productivity. They questioned more than 17.000 managers, knowledge workers and executives. 56% of workers confess, that switching between different apps keeps them away from being productive, and they commonly use more than 10 applications daily. They don’t get done their essential work in time. What is the scale of this issue? 68% of surveyed employees said that it takes them at least 30 minutes per day to switch between applications. Moreover, this “app fatigue” prevents people from handling high-priority tasks.
However, there are some good news too! People get used to technology very quickly. 76% of employees acknowledge that 5 years ago, they didn’t use so many apps and services. 90% of them state that they rate companies which provide subscriptions for useful software higher.
Also, the more apps one uses every day, the more likely this person will use a new collaboration tool. For example, only 14% of people who are not using any work apps will try to use something new. On the contrary, employees who are currently using more than 10, are eager to learn about a new productivity software. They appear to be more tech-savvy and easily adapting.
App Overload and Its Threats
We believe that our readers have on average about 10 productivity software and apps on their phones or office hardware. Harmonie’s survey of 900 professionals shows that workers often get overloaded with all those tech tools.
- 43% state that they have to switch from one app to another all the time just to cope with basic work.
- 41% of respondents turn to several apps per day to collect the necessary information. of course, this requires opening of several windows and may cause confusion and distraction.
- 67% of them would like to have everything in a single window.
What we thought was good turned out to be a threat to performance. A huge amount of useful productivity software causes a decrease in productivity and shifts employee’s focus to inessential tasks. Finally, one may even get burned out due to monotonous and painstaking work. By the way, we’ve outlined the symptoms of a burnout in this article, so you can quickly check whether you’re getting dangerously tired from work.
Tips to Normalise the App Usage and Achieve Balance
If you’re recognising yourself while reading this, it’s time to make changes! You won’t have to reorganise the whole workflow, and following these simple hacks will lead you to a long-awaited relief.
Keep in mind that being productive doesn’t mean using a handful of apps. It is about achieving great results with less efforts, which is possible when you use a smart approach. ;)
1. Choose a maximum of five
First of all, limit your app usage by selecting several absolutely necessary ones or replacing a bunch of them with multi-functional productivity software. Pay attention to integrations and additions.
Let’s take a look at Collabio Spaces for iOS. It is a document processor that helps users create, manage and store text documents, spreadsheets and PDFs. It also allows to recognise text from photos, sign electronic documents, and enables cloudless collaboration. So, there are features for which one wouldn’t need separate pieces of productivity software. This allows people to do everything they need in one app.
2. Store information in a single system
Employees spend too much time searching for documents and information. Some companies even don’t have policies regarding what productivity software their staff should use. This results in the statistics we mentioned — 41% of workers have to open several apps to find the necessary data.
That’s why it is crucial to have a single document environment.
3. Filter the incoming information
Since the lion’s share of data comes to an employee via email, it’s better to filter everything right away. Sort emails by tags or in folders — this will allow you to find the data you need in less than a minute, while random browsing would take up to 5 minutes.
4. Track the usage of apps
How many times do you switch from one to another? Create a habit of noticing the time when you start to switch between apps too often. Spending even a half an hour per day on this definitely keeps you from achieving results. If you detect such an issue, maybe it’s time to revise your apps, as we recommended in point 1. ;)
5. Let others know which channels are best to contact you
Provide people with recommendations for communicating with you. We all use many apps for that — email, several social networks, employee chats and different messengers. Tell everyone which is the preferable way to contact you, and this will prevent you from checking every application for new messages.
All this will decrease the app fatigue and help you in getting more tasks done! By the way, if you have some hack for office work, share them with us and other readers, feel free to post it in the Responses section under this article!
