How Much Time Does Your Team Lose to Copy-Paste Work?
By Dan Schlicht. . 4 minute read.
The short answer
More than most owners guess. A McKinsey Global Institute study found knowledge workers spend about 19 percent of their week searching for and gathering information, close to a full day. In a small or mid-sized business, that usually shows up as a few key people losing hours every week to reports, inbox searches, and re-typing data between systems. You can estimate your own team's number in about ten minutes.
Ask any owner how much time their team spends looking things up, and you’ll usually hear “not much.” Ask the office manager the same question and you’ll get a laugh.
The reason for the gap is simple. Copy-paste work doesn’t show up anywhere. It doesn’t have a line on the P&L or a column in the timesheet. It happens in five-minute pieces, scattered across the whole day, mostly by your most capable people. So it gets underestimated by almost everyone who isn’t doing it.
What counts as copy-paste work?
Copy-paste work is any task where a person carries information from one place to another by hand. If you’ve ever thought “I’ll just pull that real quick,” you know the feeling. Common examples:
- Running the same report every Monday and reformatting it for the meeting.
- Searching the inbox to find out what someone promised a customer.
- Looking up an order in the ERP so you can answer a question that came in by email.
- Re-typing information from an email or PDF into your CRM, ERP, or accounting system.
- Answering the same “where do I find…” questions from coworkers.
- Pulling together notes before a customer call or an owner meeting.
None of these are hard. That’s the problem. They’re easy enough that nobody questions them, and frequent enough that they quietly eat the week.
How much time is it, really?
The best-known number comes from the McKinsey Global Institute. In its 2012 report The Social Economy, it estimated that knowledge workers spend about 19 percent of their workweek searching for and gathering information. That’s close to one full day a week.
Two honest caveats. That research is more than a decade old, and it describes office workers broadly, not your business specifically. Your number could be lower. It could also be higher, because the information lives in more places than it did in 2012: an ERP, a CRM, email, Teams, shared drives, a dozen vendor portals.
So instead of borrowing someone else’s number, measure your own. It takes about ten minutes.
How to measure your own number in ten minutes
Step one: list the lookups. Ask two or three people who keep the place running, usually the office manager, someone in customer service, and whoever builds the reports, one question: “What did you look up or pull together for someone else this week?” Write down everything they say.
Step two: estimate frequency and time. For each item, write roughly how many times it happens in a week and how many minutes it takes each time. Don’t overthink it. Rough is fine.
Step three: multiply and add it up. Here’s what that might look like at a 25-person manufacturer:
| Task | Times a week | Minutes each | Hours a week |
|---|---|---|---|
| “Where’s that order?” questions | 20 | 5 | 1.7 |
| Weekly sales report for the owner | 1 | 90 | 1.5 |
| Searching email for what was promised | 15 | 6 | 1.5 |
| Re-typing emailed orders into the ERP | 30 | 4 | 2.0 |
| Prep before customer calls | 5 | 15 | 1.3 |
| Total | 8.0 |
An example, not a benchmark. Your list will look different.
Eight hours a week is a full workday. Over a 50-week year, that’s 400 hours. At a loaded cost of $35 an hour, it’s about $14,000 a year, spent on carrying information between screens. And that’s only the tasks people remembered to mention.
The costs that don’t show up in the math
Hours are the easy part to count. The bigger costs are harder to see.
Interruptions. Every “quick question” pulls someone out of real work. Five minutes to answer, then more time to get back to what they were doing.
Errors. Re-typing data means typos, missed fields, and the wrong ship date going to the wrong customer.
Things slip. The follow-up nobody sent. The quote that sat unsigned for two weeks. The invoice nobody called about. Nobody dropped the ball on purpose; the information just never landed in front of the right person.
It all lands on your best people. The person who knows where everything is gets asked everything. That’s a bottleneck, and it’s a risk the day they take a vacation or retire.
What can you do about it?
There are really three options.
- Live with it. Plenty of businesses do. It works until the business grows and the bottleneck gets worse.
- Hire. More hands help, but you’re paying a person to do the gathering, and the information is still scattered.
- Connect your AI to your systems. Most teams already use ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot. On its own, it can’t see your orders, your inbox, or your customers. Connected securely to the systems you already run, it can look things up across all of them and draft the next step in seconds. Your people still make the calls. They just stop doing the gathering.
That third option is what we call connected AI. It doesn’t replace your software, and it doesn’t need developers on your side. It works inside your existing logins and permissions, starts read-only, and logs everything it touches. If you want the longer explanation, start with What Is Connected AI, and What Can It Do for Your Business?
Where to start
Go back to your table and circle the biggest row. That’s your first target. Not an “AI strategy,” just one task your team is sick of doing by hand.
If you want help figuring out whether that task is a good fit, that’s exactly the conversation we like to have. Bring your table. We’ll tell you honestly what it would take.
Common questions
How much time do employees spend searching for information?
A 2012 McKinsey Global Institute study estimated that knowledge workers spend about 19 percent of their workweek searching for and gathering information, close to one day a week. Your own number will vary, so it's worth measuring for your team.
What is copy-paste work?
Copy-paste work is any task where a person moves information from one place to another by hand: running the same report every week, searching an inbox to answer a question, looking up an order in one system to answer a customer in another, or re-typing data from an email into an ERP or CRM.
How do I measure how much time my team spends on it?
List the lookups and reports people do for each other in a typical week, estimate how often each happens and how many minutes it takes, then multiply. Most teams finish this in about ten minutes and are surprised by the total.
Can AI eliminate copy-paste work?
A lot of it. When an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot is securely connected to your business systems, it can look things up across them and draft the next step in seconds. People still make the decisions; they just stop doing the gathering.