IDC "2.5 hours/day searching for information" — 2001 intranet-era *estimate*, widely mythologised

Claim. The widely-recycled "knowledge workers spend 2.5 hours/day (~30pct of workday) searching for information" figure traces to IDC's 2001 white paper The High Cost of Not Finding Information and was explicitly an estimate based on intranet ubiquity at the time. McKinsey Global Institute's 2012 Social Economy "1.8 hours/day / 9.3 hours/week" is a genuine MGI figure but measures interaction-worker time, not specifically "wasted" search time.

Source. IDC 2001 white paper via computhink.com PDF; Martin White "chronology of the myth" via LinkedIn (accessed 2026-06-21); McKinsey Global Institute 2012 Social Economy.

Confidence. Single-source / aging. The 2.5h figure is widely recycled and partly mythologised — flag as illustrative only; do not present as current hard data.

Caveats. The IDC figure is a 25-year-old estimate from the early intranet era; the McKinsey figure measures something different than the headline often implies. Martin White's chronology documents the path from estimate to mythological "fact."

Implication / use. Better framing: these motivate why faster access to proprietary information has value, not a magnitude claim. If the figures appear in a draft, replace with the Akerlof / Stigler / Voelker grounding — the direction is unchanged and the sourcing becomes defensible.