Count your tabs right now. Seriously. Look at the top of your browser.
Slack. Gmail. Google Docs. Notion. Jira. Figma. ChatGPT. Your calendar. That spreadsheet you've been meaning to close since Tuesday. Some dashboard you opened this morning and forgot about.
If you're north of ten, welcome to the club. Most knowledge workers are. And every single one of those tabs is quietly destroying your ability to do the work you actually opened them for.
The real cost of switching
We treat app switching like it's nothing. A click here, a tab there. You check Slack, hop over to your project board, pull up a doc, flip back to Slack because someone just pinged you, then try to remember what you were doing in the doc. Thirty seconds, tops.
Except it's not thirty seconds. Not for your brain.
Gloria Mark, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, has been studying workplace attention for over two decades. Her findings are bleak. After an interruption or context switch, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully return to the original task. Not to glance at it. To actually get back into the mental state you were in before you left.
Twenty-three minutes. For a tab switch that took two seconds.
And we're doing this constantly. Research from Harvard Business Review found that the average knowledge worker toggles between applications roughly 1,200 times per day. That's once every 26 seconds during a typical work session. Each toggle feels like nothing. But they stack up into something that looks a lot like cognitive quicksand.
The American Psychological Association has documented this for years under a less trendy name: "task switch costs." Their research shows that shifting between tasks can eat up to 40% of someone's productive time. Not because the tasks are hard, but because the switching itself chews through mental bandwidth. Your brain isn't designed to constantly load and unload different contexts. It's the mental equivalent of starting your car, driving 100 feet, turning it off, then starting it again. Over and over. All day.
It's not a discipline problem
Here's what gets me about most productivity advice on this topic. It frames context switching as a personal failing. "Just focus more." "Turn off your notifications." "Try the Pomodoro technique."
Those things can help. But they're treating a symptom. The actual problem is structural. The modern work environment is built on switching. Your project plan is in one app. Your conversations about that project are in another. The documents you're referencing live somewhere else entirely. The AI you want to consult is in yet another tab. You're not context switching because you lack discipline. You're context switching because your tools force you to.
Gloria Mark's more recent research, published in her book Attention Span, makes this point sharply. External interruptions account for about half of all workplace attention shifts. But the other half? Those are self-interruptions. People switching away from their current task on their own. Why? Because after being interrupted enough times, your brain starts pre-empting the interruptions. You've been trained by your tools to expect a disruption, so you create one yourself.
That's not a willpower problem. That's an environment problem.
What actually works
So how do you fight something that's baked into the way you work? You can't just "try harder." You need different habits and, in some cases, different infrastructure. Here's what I've seen make a real difference.
Batch your app time
Instead of checking Slack every time a notification pops up, designate specific windows for communication. Process all your messages at 9 AM, noon, and 4 PM (or whatever cadence fits your role). Same with email. Same with your project management tool.
This sounds simple, and it is. But it works because it converts dozens of tiny context switches into a few deliberate ones. You're not eliminating switching. You're compressing it into controlled blocks instead of letting it shred your day into confetti.
Kill the notifications you don't need
Go into every app you use and audit the notifications. Right now, most of them are set to defaults, which means "notify for everything." Slack will ping you for reactions on messages. Gmail will alert you for promotional emails. Your project tool will tell you about changes to tasks you're not even working on.
Turn off everything that isn't directly relevant to you doing your job today. You can always check in on your own time. What you can't do is unfragment an attention span after six hours of unnecessary pings.
Consolidate your tools
This is the big one. If the core problem is that your work lives in six different places, the most direct fix is to reduce that number.
Look at your stack and ask an honest question: how many of these tools could be replaced by one platform that does 80% of what each one does? You don't need best-in-class everything. You need fewer seams.
This is what pushed us to build Trilo, putting tasks, conversations, docs, and AI in a single workspace so teams stop bouncing between tabs. But whether it's Trilo or some other consolidated approach, the principle is the same: every tool you remove from your daily rotation is hundreds of context switches you don't have to make.
Use keyboard shortcuts like your attention depends on it
Because it does. The fastest way to reduce the friction of switching is to remove the mouse from the equation. Learn the shortcuts for your most-used apps. Use a launcher like Raycast or Alfred to jump between things without breaking your flow. Set up split-screen layouts so you're not hunting for windows.
This doesn't eliminate context switching, but it reduces the transition time, which reduces the cognitive weight of each switch. Death by a thousand cuts hurts less when the cuts are smaller.
Protect focus blocks
Block off time on your calendar for deep work. Not a vague "I'll try to focus this afternoon" plan. Actual calendar blocks that other people can see and respect. During those blocks, close everything except what you need for the task at hand.
Cal Newport has written extensively about this, and the research backs him up. Even two hours of genuinely uninterrupted work produces more output than a full day of fragmented attention. Most people haven't experienced two uninterrupted hours in months. Start there.
The compounding problem
Here's what makes context switching between apps so insidious. It doesn't feel expensive in the moment. Each individual switch is trivial. Nobody's going to complain about checking Slack. Nobody times how long it takes to find the right Google Doc.
But the costs compound. A 2023 study from Qatalog and Cornell University found that 45% of workers say context switching makes them less productive, and 43% report that switching between tools causes fatigue. Not the work itself. The switching.
And it gets worse over time. As Gloria Mark's research shows, people who are frequently interrupted develop a habit of working in shorter bursts, even when they're not being interrupted. The damage becomes self-reinforcing. Your environment fragments your attention, your brain adapts to fragmented attention, and eventually you struggle to focus even when you're given the space to.
That's not burnout from hard work. That's burnout from the infrastructure of work.
Start with one change
You're probably not going to overhaul your entire tool stack tomorrow. That's fine. Pick one thing.
Maybe it's batching your Slack checks. Maybe it's auditing your notifications this afternoon. Maybe it's blocking two hours on your calendar tomorrow morning and actually protecting them.
Whatever it is, treat it as an experiment. The research is clear that reducing context switching has measurable effects on output, stress, and job satisfaction. You don't have to take that on faith. You'll feel it within a week.
The tabs aren't going anywhere. But you can stop letting them run your day.
Tired of juggling a dozen apps? Trilo puts your tasks, conversations, docs, and AI in one place. Take a look, or reach out at hello@trilo.chat.
