Avoiding Toggle Tax: How to Reduce Context Switching & Revitalize Your Productivity

Imagine you’re a carpenter. You’ve been tasked with constructing a rocking chair made from mahogany wood. You prepare your workshop, assemble your tools and materials, and carefully make your measurements. You turn on the table saw, hear the blade’s frenetic whirl, and start cutting.   

Now imagine stopping in the middle of what you’re doing. You drive to a new location to start on a rocking chair made from walnut. You’re then interrupted to go somewhere else to construct another from ash. Then birch. And so it goes: Rather than start and finish one chair in one location, you crisscross workshops (each stocked with varying tools and materials) to assemble different chairs (each with their own unique character and considerations).     

Doesn’t sound like a very productive way to work, does it?

A similar type of context switching is widely accepted and often expected out of employees who work in a business environment where different applications are used. In fact, the average Fortune 500 employee toggles between these systems nearly 1,200 times a day — roughly 9% of their annual time at work¹.

Effects of Toggle Tax

While context switching may seem innocuous on the surface, the effects are far more harmful than many realize. What’s often referred to as the “toggle tax” of jumping between different applications can be a significant drag on:

Productivity Levels: Because each application has its own quirks and context, our brains require time to process one from the other. According to a 2021 study, it takes an average of 9.5 minutes to get back into a productive workflow after switching between digital apps².

Employee Wellbeing: Humans perceive excessive toggling as a stressor, prompting their bodies to release the hormone cortisol. The long-term activation of the stress response system can lead to an array of health problems — from anxiety and brain fog to headaches and heart disease.

Revenue Opportunities: Employees who are unproductive and mentally depleted ultimately open the door to lost revenue. This can be due to higher employee turnover, errors/delays in key processes (e.g., accounts payable, order management, accounts receivable, etc.), and damaged relationships with customers and suppliers.

A Little Automation Goes a Long Way

Eliminating all context switching is not a realistic option for today’s companies; however, reducing the impact of toggle tax is certainly achievable with the right digital technology on your side.

Automation solutions — particularly the ones powered by AI technology — are highly effective in reducing the prevalence of “swivel chair” roles, which are typically hotbeds for context switching activities. This is done by centralizing procure-to-pay and order-to-cash communications in one fully integrated platform (i.e., employees relate to ONE application instead of sometimes hundreds).

Additionally, automation solutions remove the requirement for manual data entry and much of the document/data searching taking up employees’ time — significantly cutting down on the amount of toggling from emails, ERPs, spreadsheets, etc.  

For Andrea Linke, Credit Manager at Kuriyama of America, Inc., automating some of the tedious, low-value activities in her team’s collections management process had transformational results. “If a customer wanted a statement that day, it was like six or seven steps in order to pull all the information, save the document and email it. It felt like my team was spending more of their time doing that kind of thing than actually doing collections calls,” she said.

A company’s most important asset is that which produces the most value — its employees. Assigning them to a fate of multitasking and context switching only serves to hurt them and, in turn, your business.

If the goal is to build the strongest, most resilient business possible, it begs the question: What kind of carpenter do you want to be?

1 Das, R., Dadlani, S., & Murty, R. (August 29, 2022). How Much Time and Energy Do We Waste Toggling Between Applications?. Harvard Business Review.

2 Workgeist Report ’21: Research into culture, mindset and productivity for the modern work era. (2021). Qatalog in collaboration with Cornell University’s Ellis Idea Lab.