Research
The researchbehind the numbers.
The studies behind ActionOrder’s estimates. Each figure says what it measures and who ran it.
Paid time versus productive time
Paid for the whole day.The core work gets part of it.
Study after study finds a gap between the hours a business pays for and the hours that reach the core work.
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Knowledge workers75% on productive work: 30 of 40 hours a weekAPQC survey of 982 knowledge workers, 2021
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Professional services firms66.4% billable utilization, the lowest in the benchmark’s 19-year historySPI Research benchmark of 509 professional services organizations, 2025 data
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White-collar workers49% of hours left after low-value tasks, which take an estimated 51%Talker Research for HP, 2,000 American white-collar workers, 2025
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Lawyers37% of an 8‑hour day on billable work, about 3 hoursClio Legal Trends Report 2023, platform data
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Knowledge workers33% of the day on skilled work, with under 10% more on strategy and 58% on coordinating workAsana survey of 10,624 knowledge workers, 2022
Each study measures something different, so don’t read them as one number. None finds more than three-quarters of the day going to core work.
The biggest drains APQC found
- Managing internal communication
- 3.6 hrs
- Looking for or requesting information
- 2.8 hrs
- Unnecessary or unproductive meetings
- 2.2 hrs
APQC survey of 982 knowledge workers, 2021. Self-estimated hours per 40-hour week.
What changes with ActionOrder
Where studies break the gap down, coordination is the biggest share: messages, searching and meetings. ActionOrder takes much of that off each person’s plate.
- The list sorts itself. The feed ranks signals from your connected tools into one next step.
- Context comes with the card. Records, history and a first draft.
- No pings, no status meetings. ActionOrder is the only prompt.
- Focus holds while you work. New cards wait their turn; only urgent items get through.
- Every logged hour lands on a task. People log time on the card they’re working.
All of your team’s billable time is task time. Time can only be logged against a task, so every billed hour traces to a card and its client or project.
See what the time is worthPrioritizing and refocusing
Deciding what’s nexttakes real time.
The closest measures of time spent working out what’s next and getting back on task.
Roughly 9% of time at workspent reorienting after switching apps, across 137 people at three large companies.Harvard Business Review, 2022
Nearly 7% of time at workspent not working at all, about 34 minutes a day, in 35,548 workday diaries.Burda, Genadek and Hamermesh, NBER, 2016
5 hours a weekthat managers report spending assigning, prioritizing and re-prioritizing their team’s work.Reclaim.ai survey of 2,000+ professionals, 2022
10.8% of the weekthat professionals report spending recovering and catching up after their priorities change, about 52 minutes of an 8‑hour day. Individual contributors reported 12.1%, managers 10.6%.Reclaim.ai survey, 2022
Nearly 10 minutesafter switching to an email alert before people returned to the application they’d been using. After 27% of alerts, they stayed away from that window for more than two hours.Iqbal and Horvitz, Microsoft Research, 2007
34% of employeessay they guess what matters most when they aren’t given priorities.Slingshot survey of 305 U.S. employees, 2023
Sources
Where these numbers come from.
Studies run or paid for by software companies are marked as such.
Show all 10 sources
- Iqbal and Horvitz, “Disruption and Recovery of Computing Tasks: Field Study, Analysis, and Directions”Microsoft Research, CHI 2007. Logging software on the work computers of 27 people over two weeks. 9 minutes 33 seconds on average from switching to an email alert to returning to the application they’d left, which the authors use as a proxy for resuming the task.
- Reclaim.ai, Task Management Trends ReportSurvey of 2,000+ professionals using Jira, Asana, Todoist, Trello and ClickUp; article dated March 29, 2022. Self-reported estimates from a scheduling-software vendor; fielding dates, sampling method and the number of managers surveyed are not disclosed.
- Slingshot, 2023 Digital Work Trends Report, Part 2Survey of 305 full-time U.S. employees run by Dynata for Slingshot; data collected in Q2 2023, published December 2023; respondents could pick more than one answer. Slingshot is a work-management software vendor.
- APQC, “APQC Survey Finds One Quarter of Knowledge Workers’ Time Is Lost Due to Productivity Drains”November 9, 2021. Survey of 982 full-time knowledge workers.
- SPI Research, 2026 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark, as summarized by CertiniaBillable utilization of 66.4% in 2025, the lowest in SPI’s 19-year survey history; responses from 509 professional services organizations. Published February 2026.
- Talker Research for HP, “Drowning in busywork? Low-value tasks breaking workers”October 7, 2025. Commissioned by HP. Survey of 2,000 American white-collar and knowledge workers and 1,000 IT decision makers at companies with over 100 employees, August 25 to September 2, 2025. The 51% is an estimate; the method isn’t published. HP sells workplace technology.
- Clio, 2023 Legal Trends ReportUtilization is the share of an 8-hour day spent on billable work. Aggregated, anonymized data from tens of thousands of U.S. legal professionals on paid Clio plans. Clio sells legal practice software.
- Asana, Anatomy of Work Index 2022Survey of 10,624 knowledge workers in seven countries, October 2021. Self-reported. Asana sells work-management software.
- Murty, Dadlani and Das, “How Much Time and Energy Do We Waste Toggling Between Applications?”Harvard Business Review, August 29, 2022. 137 people on 20 teams at three Fortune 500 companies: just under four hours a week, roughly 9% of time at work, spent reorienting after switching apps. The lead author is founder and CTO of Soroco, which sells work-analysis software.
- Burda, Genadek and Hamermesh, “Not Working at Work: Loafing, Unemployment and Labor Productivity”NBER Working Paper 21923, January 2016; published as “Unemployment and Effort at Work,” Economica, 2020. American Time Use Survey 2003 to 2012: nearly 7% of time at the workplace, about 34 minutes a day, not working.