83%
Know it could be automated
Of knowledge workers say they spend too much time on manual data entry that a machine could be doing instead.
Research published since January 2025 · every figure linked
Everybody knows their processes are a mess. Almost nobody has measured it.
That gap is the entire reason this business exists. Here is what the recent numbers actually say.
Organisations still routing work by hand
82%
still use paper-based, manual routing of tasks, propped up by Excel. Not in 2009. Now.
Where the week actually goes
The quiet tax on everybody's calendar.
4.6h
Lost every week to duplicate work
Four hours and 38 minutes a week, about a tenth of the working week, spent doing something that had already been done.
209h
A year, on duplicated work
Per person, per year. That is more than five working weeks, spent redoing things.
40%
Spend a quarter of the week on repetition
Over 40% of workers give at least a quarter of every week to manual, repetitive tasks. Email and data entry lead the list.
TeamDynamix2025
A working week, at 40 hours
Work already done once
Everything else
The reason it never gets fixed
It is nobody's job, so it stays nobody's problem.
Ask most companies who owns their processes end to end and you get a pause. Operations owns some of it. IT owns the systems. Finance owns the numbers. Nobody owns the whole thing, which is exactly why it drifts.
15%
Have mature process management
Most organisations sit at early or middle maturity, and barely moved between 2023 and 2025. Standing still is the norm.
80%
Held back by ageing technology
Four in five organisations say outdated digital technology is actively holding them back.
45%
Of SMBs still on paper
Still keeping customer, contact and vendor records on paper. In businesses that also run cloud accounting.
27%
Of the day is actual skilled work
The rest goes on "work about work": chasing, searching, updating, and talking about the job rather than doing it.
And it is not only a money problem
Repetitive work is burning your good people out.
85%
Say repetition drives burnout
Workers name repetitive tasks as a top contributor to burnout, with that stress triggered around four times a week.
Talker Research2025
200+
Stress moments a year
Four times a week, every week. The same avoidable frustration, more than two hundred times a year, per person.
Talker Research2025
You are not paying people to retype things. You just are, about five hours a week each.
Why we exist
The gap, in one picture.
82%
route work by hand and have never mapped or costed a single process end to end
…nobody's job to close it…
15%
have process management mature enough to actually know where their time goes
Everything in between is the opportunity, and it is the reason a consultant can walk into almost any company and find six figures of waste inside a fortnight. Not because the people are bad at their jobs. Because measuring the work is nobody's job.
On the numbers above
Every figure on this page comes from research or reporting published from January 2025 onwards, and every one links out to where we found it. Some of those pages are industry round-ups that cite an older primary study in turn, so follow the link before you quote a number in anything that matters. Where a figure is a survey of self-reported behaviour, it is exactly that, and we have not dressed any of it up as measurement.
The numbers we trust most are the ones from your own business, which is the whole point of the ten minute tool.