We Added One Platform And Saved 5 Workweeks A Year

Walking through the airport last week, I discovered we've officially lost our minds with apps.

Airline app for online check-in. Parking app to pay for my spot. Airport app to see security wait times. And my personal favorite - an elevator app to call the lift.

Four apps for what used to be basic human activities. My phone's home screen looked like a software catalog.

The whole experience made me wonder how often we do this same thing in our workplaces. Adding another platform for every little task without stepping back to ask if we're actually making life easier for our people.

So I spent the flight thinking about all the ways we accidentally sabotage productivity at work and identified four workflow assassins that most of us deal with every day.

1. App overload and context switching

Your team jumps between apps 1,200 times a day. Harvard Business Review tracked this digital circus, and honestly, it's exhausting just reading about it.

Every time you move from one tool to another, you lose momentum. You're constantly opening new tabs, logging into different systems, and navigating between platforms just to complete basic tasks. While you're bouncing between apps, your actual work sits unfinished.

You check visitors into one app, book a meeting room in another, then reserve your desk through a third system. You've burned through mental energy just coordinating basic workplace needs.

The math is brutal. Teams lose almost four hours weekly just getting their bearings after each app switch. Over a year, that hemorrhages five full working weeks to digital whiplash. Every interruption steals 9.5 minutes of focus time as your brain crawls back to productive thinking.

2. Information silos and data scatter

You know that game where you ask a colleague "where did you see that information" and they respond with a blank stare? Then you both embark on a thrilling archaeological dig through seven different systems to unearth one simple piece of data. Fun times.

This fragmentation derails your decision-making and wastes your time. You duplicate efforts because you can't see what your colleagues have already handled. You manage operations blindly because insights scatter across separate databases. Your strategic planning becomes educated guessing.

Your instinct is to build better search tools. Wrong move.

The real solution eliminates your hunt entirely. When workplace data consolidates into one system, you stop playing detective and start making confident decisions. Information becomes your tool instead of your obstacle.

3. Manual process redundancy

My heart breaks a little every time I fill out a paper form at the government office for something that could have been automated when dial-up internet was still a thing. That same soul-crushing manual labor somehow made its way into your shiny modern office.

Most workplace coordination still relies on you being a human copy-paste machine. You manually check multiple systems to find available resources, send confirmation emails that could be generated automatically, and update different platforms with the same information. Worse yet, some processes still live on actual paper! Because apparently we're collecting workplace inefficiencies like vintage stamps.

This redundancy breeds errors and important updates get missed because they live in one system but not others. You become the unreliable middleman in your own workflow.

4. User frustration and training overhead

Remember when your TV remote had 47 buttons and you still needed to navigate through HDMI settings, input modes, and three different menus just to watch Netflix? Now your remote has voice command and a dedicated Netflix button. Your workplace went the opposite direction, turning simple tasks into complex multi-step processes.

Every new tool dumps another learning curve on your plate. Different interfaces, password management, troubleshooting when systems have bad days. This cognitive overhead accumulates until your brain feels like a cluttered junk drawer.

The real burden comes from remembering which tool does what. When you wonder whether visitor management happens in the main system or that other app you downloaded months ago, you experience friction that should not exist.

We listen first, then we build

Over the past year, nearly every client conversation has mentioned these exact frustrations. The app jumping. The information hunting. The manual busy work. The system overload.

These conversations shaped what we built at Joan. We kept hearing the same pain points, so we created integrated workplace management that handles everything - visitor check-ins, meeting rooms, desk bookings, parking and assets, and workplace digital signage. 

But here's what makes Joan different. You get the full toolkit from day one, then use what fits your reality. 

Don't need desk booking? Alright - use the booking system for your training rooms or focus pods. 

Parking sorted? Great - deploy that same functionality to manage shared equipment like monitors, projectors, or even those rolling whiteboards everyone's always searching for.

The beauty of Joan is that it adapts to how your workplace actually works. One platform, endless possibilities, zero friction.

Explore the platform that helped us achieve all of this.

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