How can we work smarter in an era of endless productivity tools?

Slack, Gmail, Monday.com, Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Docs—this is a (surely incomplete) list of apps and platforms used over the course of reporting and writing this story.

It may ring familiar to many digital workers who have grown accustomed to constantly toggling among the seemingly infinite number of workplace productivity tools that have come to populate our professional lives.

One of the most influential of these tools, Gmail, debuted on April 1, 2004, and is credited with forever changing the ways we use email—and influencing the trajectory of the internet and workplace tech.

At the time, the service’s offering of 1,000 megabytes of storage seemed so improbable that many assumed it was an April Fool’s joke.

“Google’s rivals have copied Gmail so thoroughly that it’s hard to remember just how terrible webmail was before Gmail came along,” Slate recounted in a story marking Gmail’s 10th birthday. “Pages were clunky and slow to load, search functions were terrible, and spam was rampant. You couldn’t organize messages by conversation. Storage capacity was anemic, and if you ran out of space, you had to spend hours deleting old emails or buy more storage from your provider. Gmail…taught us that Web apps could run as smoothly as desktop applications. And it taught us the power of cloud storage.”

Aamer Baig, a senior partner at McKinsey, recalled how in the early days of email, communications were limited within a company. Now, the entire world is theoretically connected.

“Now it is literally a countless number of channels,” Baig told Tech Brew. “You have Slack, you have text, you have email, then you have collaboration spaces in documents and workflow, in applications. On top of that you’re also getting AI that is getting embedded into all these tools.”

All of this innovation has made us more connected than ever—and yet!—somehow still exhausted and struggling to optimize our work lives. So how can we work smarter and not harder?

Paying the toggle tax

App fatigue is the phenomenon of becoming overwhelmed and exhausted from toggling between various apps and platforms. Research has demonstrated that switching between different contexts or tasks doesn’t just make workers feel burned out—it actually reduces productivity.

In response to a 2023 survey by project management software provider Wrike, 58% of knowledge workers said they’d like to use fewer apps at work: “They are crying out for clear, streamlined, and consolidated processes.”

The report also pointed out that the proliferation of apps and platforms makes it more difficult for business leaders to have visibility into what employees are doing, which “leads to wasted efforts, delayed or canceled projects, and employee burnout.”

One Harvard Business Review study found that each employee working on “a single supply-chain transaction” at a Fortune 500 consumer goods company toggled 350 times between 22 apps and websites. In the course of one day, every person toggled more than 3,600 times.

The study found that this act of “context switching” causes workers to lose up to five working weeks per year, or nearly a tenth of their time on the clock––what the authors dubbed the “toggling tax.”

And it appears that workers are struggling to effectively use all of these tools. Nearly half of digital workers reported “that at least half the time they look for information they couldn’t find it,” in 2022, according to Gartner. In 2024, only 31% reported having that issue, but those who used AI were more likely to struggle. And solutions like intranets and new employee communications platforms haven’t solved the problem.

Tori Paulman, a VP analyst at Gartner, told Tech Brew that in the last two years, digital workers’ reported satisfaction with the apps they use for work has plummeted.

Amid all this exhaustion, frustration, and dissatisfaction, workers are devising their own solutions and turning to their personal favorite apps to meet their professional needs.

“This causes a huge problem,” Paulman said. “This is one of the things that’s fueling the ROI crisis with AI, is that information is fragmented across hundreds of apps.”

But what about me?

To that end, Paulman pointed to personalization as the solution that employees are clamoring for.

Gartner’s 2024 Digital Worker Survey, for example, found that 51% of digital workers “customize or build tools leveraging the digital technology their organization provides,” or get their own.

“Getting people to use the thing you give them, rather than the thing they like, it’s the perennial issue,” Paulman said.

Instead of trying to get employees to buy into a consolidated platform or yet another new tool, Paulman said it’s best to first determine how employees are using their existing tools. It may be that rather than a new tech solution, what’s needed is clearer communication at the front end of a new project about which tools will be used and how.

“The leaders need to bring some sanity to how and when we use these technologies, in order to calm that cognitive fatigue,” Paulman said.

Work it out

McKinsey’s Baig, too, offered a low-tech solution: creating individual and company-level rubrics to guide how employees use workplace productivity tools.

Time sensitivity, for example, is a rubric he uses in his own work. Employers might encourage workers to use Slack and text for urgent matters and emails for non-time-sensitive ones. And workers might block off chunks of time to work without constant interruptions from notifications, with incoming communications limited to higher-ups who need a quick response.

“I’m exceptionally excited about the tools we have at our disposal,” Baig said. “But I don’t think all of them should be used all the time.”

He believes we’ll continue to find ways to integrate technology into our lives and careers in beneficial ways, but to make the most out of what technology has to offer, he suggests less multi-tasking.

“Sometimes the most productive and the most effective we are is when we are mono-tasking,” he said.

AI can fix it!

Of course, one of the much-touted solutions to the problems surrounding workplace productivity is AI.

Google, for one, is integrating AI into Gmail and its Google Workspace suite of apps.

“Our goal is to provide powerful, genuinely useful technology that clears people’s path to productivity instead of complicating it,” Gmail said in a statement. The email service now has AI-enabled capabilities like summaries of email threads, a Smart Reply feature, and a Q&A tool that enables users to ask questions about their inbox.

“With Gmail connected to the broader Google Workspace suite of apps, and with AI assistance woven in seamlessly,” according to Gmail, “all of our tools work together so people can stay in their flow of work without app or context switching.”

Both Paulman and Baig said they’re hearing more and more about workers using AI to manage emails, generate content, and summarize information—raising the possibility that we might someday be much less attached to our inboxes.

“It might be, actually, that AI attached to email might get us out of our inboxes,” Paulman said. “But only if we can get out of our inboxes.”