Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Radical Kander podcast. I'm Jason Rozoff. Kim is out today.

I'm Amy Sandler, and today we're talking about app overload at work. There was a survey by Forbes

advisor, and it found that people spend half their working week using communication apps.

And this doesn't even take into account the half dozen or so other apps most people are using

during their workday just for themselves. There was a Harvard Business Review study from 2022

and it found that the average worker spends around four hours per week reorienting. I'm having

to reorient myself around that word, reorienting themselves after toggling between apps. Jason,

just before I go on, how would you define reorienting after toggling? Everybody's experienced

this with whether or not they recognize it, but there's a cost that you, for

example, let's say you're in the middle of writing something and a notification pops up in

the upper right-hand corner of your screen and you sort of look over at the notification

and then you look back and even though it was only a few seconds,

you often have to reread the last part of the sentence that you had written in order to

remember where you were. Great. And so just to quote the study that Forbes advisor said, it says,

quote, psychology and neuroscience have shown that jumping between tasks, also called context

switching, is cognitively taxing.

We find that even switching or toggling between two applications equates to context switching.

Excessive toggling increases the brain's production of cortisol, which is the primary

stress hormone, slows us down and makes it harder to focus, end quote.

So just to go back to some of those hours, if we're spending 20 hours a week communicating on

apps and another four hours reorienting our brains after toggling, all of a sudden,

we've only got 16 hours a week to do actual, to do actual work.

...