Employees are locked in an eternal struggle between productivity and distraction. Recently I was reading about Miller’s Law, which posits that the average person can hold only 5 ± 2 objects in their short-term memory. Multitasking affects your productivity, even though you’re probably unaware of the impact. Getting back on task? That takes anywhere from five to 30 minutes.
So, picture this. I’m “in the zone,” working away and being productive. Suddenly, I get a request for input on a technical issue. I drop what I’m doing, open the issue tracker, browse the summary, and share my comments.
Oh, yeah, while I’m working on other stuff, I also want to put in a request for PTO and review feedback that a colleague has provided on a document.
Combined, the tasks take me 10 minutes to complete. I jump back into my code editor and try recall my train of thought and get back in the zone. This context switching – just to complete a few simple tasks – will eat up as much as half an hour. Now, imagine dealing with this throughout your day. (You probably don’t have to imagine.)
In my work, I’m navigating among multiple apps every day. Developer apps, reporting and monitoring apps, HR apps, and others. The constant switching among apps often hurts my focus and has an impact on my productivity.
And I’m far from alone here. Did you know, employees spend about 20 percent of their time searching for information and use only four or five key functions in most of their business applications?
Get Relevant, Actionable Information with Microapps
That was then. Now? Microapps deliver to me relevant, actionable notifications straight into Citrix Workspace. My intelligent feed and personalized workflows give me what I need, when I need it, helping me handle these necessary tasks and stay focused on my core responsibilities.
In my Citrix Workspace feed, I can accomplish all the work I had to get done without jumping around to different apps. By using the microapp and interacting with its event notification (also known as a card), I can check out the technical issue and share comments. I can also submit my PTO request and review feedback from a colleague on another issue, all with microapps in Citrix Workspace. There’s no need for constant app switching. Now that I’ve incorporated Citrix Workspace and microapps into my daily work, I can get back to my code editor quickly, without losing focus.
Enhance Employee Experience with Custom App Integrations
Citrix Workspace comes with about 100 microapps out of the box, but you can further enhance the employee experience with custom application integrations. These integrations support use cases for custom enterprise applications and systems and are made easier with our low-code microapp builder.
Building these integrations are as simple as:
- Planning: Selecting the target application
- Creating: Setting up the integration and authentication
- Configuring: Retrieving data relevant to the user, creating actions, pages and notifications
Welcome to the Future of Work
Microapps will transform the way users interact with their applications and systems, giving them a single use case that streamlines functionality from complex enterprise apps. With microapss in Citrix Workspace, employees will no longer have to navigate dozens of complex apps just to get simple tasks done or track down the critical information they need. The future of work is one where employees can work efficiently, stay organized, and have only the specific information they’re looking for delivered to them.
Want to find o ut more? There’s plenty of opportunity. Citrix Education is taking the mystery out of microapps with its new course, Citrix Workspace Microapps Essentials, and its new credential, Citrix Microapps Service Certified. Learn more here.
They’re also offering a free, one-hour webinar on Thursday, March 19, from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. (ET), where you can learn how to build custom microapp integrations with Citrix Workspace.
And check out this summary of the great microapps that were built in just a few hours at last fall’s Citrix Converge developer conference and watch the keynote video below.
