The Hidden Cost of Manual IT Work: Context Switching, Backlogs, and Burnout

Individually, none of these tasks are hard. Collectively, they can flatten an entire function.

The true cost of repetitive work isn’t just time; it’s attention, it’s momentum. It’s the steady erosion of craft and curiosity, the “brain rot” feeling that shows up when highly capable people spend their days crossing off items on a checklist.

When that becomes the norm, it doesn’t just slow your IT team down, it quietly creates the conditions for backlogs, burnout, and turnover, a combination that makes it hard for companies to scale.

Manual work turns IT into a context-switching machine

Most IT teams don’t lose their day to one big problem. They lose it to a hundred tiny pivots:

• Urgent ticket → routine request → vendor portal → spreadsheet → chat thread
• Solve → document → update → follow up → repeat
• “Quick question” interruptions that aren’t quick once they pull you out of focus

This is where manual work does its most damage: it forces constant context switching, taking someone away from tasks that truly move the needle.

Even when each switch feels small, the cognitive cost adds up. The American Psychological Association notes that switching between tasks carries “switch costs” that reduce efficiency and increase errors, and those costs accumulate when switching happens repeatedly. Similarly, research out of UC Irvine has also shown that interruptions increase stress and perceived workload, even when people compensate by working faster.

What this looks like in IT: you’re not just doing tasks, you’re repeatedly reconstructing your mental state. You’re constantly reloading the “what’s going on here?” context. That’s exhausting work, even if it doesn’t look like it from the outside.

Repetitive tasks don’t build skill, so teams stop growing

There’s a lie embedded in the phrase “keeping the lights on,” and that grinding through repetitive work is neutral.

It isn’t.

Repetitive tasks consume the same finite resource you need for higher-value work: focus. And that focus is what enables engineers and IT pros to:

• Learn new systems
• Improve reliability and security posture
• Build better internal tooling
• Strengthen documentation and self-service
• Partner with the business proactively

When manual work dominates, upskilling becomes “something we’ll do later,” and later never comes.

This isn’t hypothetical. Surveys consistently show a meaningful chunk of the workweek gets swallowed by repetitive admin-style tasks. Smartsheet has reported that many workers spend a substantial portion of their week on manual, repetitive work.

When that’s true broadly, it’s almost always more true in IT, because IT is the connective tissue between every tool, every access request, every workflow change, and every “can you just…” that keeps an organization moving forward.

Backlogs aren’t just a volume problem, they’re a systems problem

Backlogs are often framed as: “We need more people.” Sometimes, that can be true.

But backlogs also form when the work is structured in a way that guarantees queue growth:

• Each request requires multiple handoffs.
• “Simple” tickets still require toggling between tools and waiting on approvals.
• Knowledge lives in DMs instead of reusable workflows.
• The same requests arrive again because the organization has no self-service path.

The backlog becomes a tax on the team’s attention. The longer it grows, the more time you spend triaging and updating stakeholders, and the less time you have to eliminate the root causes that create the backlog in the first place.

The human cost: burnout, stagnation, and attrition

People don’t burn out only because they work hard. They burn out when they work hard and the work feels endless, low-leverage, and disconnected from growth.

Burnout has measurable organizational cost. A study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimated burnout-related costs to employers in the U.S. ranging from roughly $4,000 to $21,000 per employee per year, depending on role.

And the pathway from manual grind → burnout isn’t mysterious:

1. Repetitive work reduces autonomy and craft.
2. Context switching increases stress and cognitive fatigue.
3. Backlogs create constant urgency and “never done” pressure.
4. Stagnation sets in because there’s no time or energy to improve systems.
5. Burnout follows, and then turnover.

When turnover hits IT, companies don’t just lose capacity. They lose institutional knowledge: the weird edge cases, the “why it’s like that,” the security nuance, the relationships that make cross-functional work smooth. Rebuilding that isn’t linear. It’s disruptive.

The scaling trap: manual work caps the company, not just IT

Here’s the hard truth: manual IT work scales with headcount.

Every new employee adds more accounts, more devices, more permissions, more support questions, more exceptions. If fulfillment depends on human attention and handoffs, IT becomes the bottleneck, no matter how talented the team is.

This is why “brain rot” work is not just unpleasant. It’s a growth constraint.

What industry leaders do differently

The goal isn’t “do more with less.” It’s to protect human attention for the work only humans can do.

High-performing IT orgs tend to invest in three things:

1) Fewer forced context switches

• Consolidate intake and status visibility (so people aren’t chasing updates across channels)
• Reduce tool sprawl where possible
• Make work easier to batch (instead of a constant stream of pings)

2) A deliberate shift from fulfillment to enablement

• Self-service for repeatable requests
• Standardized approvals and policy-as-code where appropriate
• Knowledge that compounds (docs, templates, workflows)

3) Time that is protected for improvement

• Treating automation and process improvement as first-class work, not “extra”
• Measuring repeat requests and handoff points as indicators of system debt

The punchline: you can’t upskill a team that never gets to think.

The future of IT: from “ticket taker” to “operating system”

The next era of IT won’t be defined by who closes the most tickets. It will be defined by who builds the best internal experience, the systems that make employees productive and secure without friction.

That shift is already underway:

• IT is becoming product-oriented. The “users” are employees. The “product” is how fast and safely they can get what they need.
• Work is moving from manual fulfillment to automated orchestration. Not because humans aren’t valuable, because human attention is too valuable to spend on copy/paste operations.
• Teams will win by reducing cognitive load. Fewer tool hops. Fewer approvals-by-email. Fewer mysteries. More clarity, fewer interrupts. (Which matters because task switching and interruptions reliably increase stress and effort.)

In that world, the bar for employee IT is simple: fast, consistent, and secure. Employees shouldn’t need to know which system holds the answer, which admin owns the tool, or which form is “the right one this quarter.” They should just be able to request what they need and move on with their work.

This is the lens Harmony is built around.

Harmony’s philosophy is not “add more process.” It’s “remove the unnecessary work:” the repetitive fulfillment that drains IT, fragments attention, and prevents teams from investing in the higher-leverage projects that actually move the organization forward. The objective is to help IT teams reclaim time and mental bandwidth so they can focus on reliability, security, and building great employee experiences, rather than living in a permanent state of backlog.

A final thought: the cost isn’t only efficiency

Manual work isn’t inherently bad. Everyone does some. The problem is when it becomes the majority of the job for people who signed up to solve problems, build systems, and improve reliability.

When IT becomes a treadmill of repetitive tickets and constant switching, people lose the sense that they’re getting better at their craft. The work stops compounding. Satisfaction drops. Burnout rises. And scaling gets harder, not easier.

If you want an IT org that can grow with the company, the starting point is simple:

• Protect your team’s attention.
• Reduce the repetitive load.
• Create space for learning and system improvement.

That’s how you prevent stagnation, and build an IT function that scales.