Key takeaway
The time lost to tool switching rarely shows up on a timesheet, which is exactly why it never gets fixed.
"Quick, what's the status on the vendor contract" sounds like a thirty-second question. In a project spread across five tools, answering it honestly might mean checking a task board for the task, a shared drive for the actual document, an email thread for the latest reply, and a chat channel for whether anyone mentioned an update since. None of that is difficult work. All of it is switching cost: the time and mental effort spent moving between systems rather than doing anything with the answer once found.
Why this cost is invisible on paper
Nobody logs "eleven minutes finding out whether the vendor replied" as a line item, so it never shows up as a problem to solve, it just shows up as a vaguely exhausting week. Multiply that by every team member checking multiple systems multiple times a day, and the aggregate is significant even though no single instance of it looks worth fixing on its own.
This is also why it survives so many well-intentioned process reviews: reviews look at what work got done, not at the navigation overhead surrounding it, so the actual cost stays outside whatever gets measured.
Fewer places to look, not more discipline
The answer is not asking people to be more organized about which tool has which answer, that just adds another thing to remember. It is reducing the number of places a simple project question can require checking. When a task, its owner, its due date, and anything blocking it live in the same record, "what's the status" becomes a single lookup instead of a small investigation, and that time comes back to the team every single day, not just once.