Close those tabs Switching between applications ruins your productivity

Close those tabs Switching between applications ruins your productivityClose those tabs Switching between applications ruins your productivitySwitching from email to Chrome to Word to WordPress and back again isnt multitasking, its just torching your productivity and increasing the chance youll make a mistake, a new study finds.The study from Pegasystems, a software company, analyzed nearly 5 million hours of desktop activity of British operational support employees of 35 weltweit companies across 11 industries, who fruchtweinly perform back office (non-client-facing) work, data entry, or customer support center (also known as contact center) tasks.Email wasnt very helpful in getting work done for these particular types of workers. While people use email to manage tasks, it doesnt really contribute to production, the study found. Nevertheless, workers checked their email 10 times an hour. While email was used during 12% of workers active work time, only 34% of that percentage contrib uted to production. Workers had a 22% error rate when working in email applications.Longer hours, more mistakesThe study found that more mistakes were made the longer someone worked. People with longer shifts averaged 9% more mistakes than people with shorter shifts. Tuesdays are the days with the most mistakes because shifts tend to run longer on Tuesdays and Fridays.More switching, more mistakesThe real enemy of workers time, stress level, and productivity was the number of applications they were expected to use, and the constant back-and-forth that using them required. The amount of toggling between applications that the average worker in this study performed was truly mind-boggling they switched applications 1,100 times in a day, going between as many as 35 different applications in one shift.Not surprisingly, workers using 30 different applications or more have a 28% high error rate than those using fewer programs.With all these applications, workers often need to transfer data between them they copy-and-paste 134 times a day.In some industries at least, it seems that the desktop has become unnecessarily complicated. Management has followed a trend of becoming entranced by every new program bearing promises and bells and whistles its hard to say what will reverse that and encourage them to scale back.