How Much Time Are Component Engineers Losing Each Day Searching for Data?

In 2021, Cal Newport, an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and bestselling author, published a post on his website criticizing our current age of constant busyness. “The volume of obligations on our proverbial plates—vague projects, off-hand promises, quick calls and small tasks—continues to increase at an alarming rate,” he wrote. When people today are asked how they’re doing, he added, rather than replying with a neutral “fine,” “it’s rare to encounter someone who doesn’t instead respond with a weary ‘busy.’” Indeed, much of the academic’s research and writing over the past decade has focused on challenging the culture of hyperactivity and overwhelming work that many American workers experience today. In the 2021 post, he declared this growing phenomenon an “epidemic of chronic overload.” 

Why We Have “Less Time” Than Ever Today

The “chronic overload” that so many professionals are experiencing today isn’t the result of a single culprit. Rather, many forces are constantly chipping away at our attention and subtly pushing us to do more tasks and projects. There’s also the insatiable appetite among the vast majority of corporations for growth, expansion, and optimization. There are even a slew of emerging platforms and technologies—sometimes called “employee productivity tracking”—that keep a tight leash on worker output and don’t exactly encourage healthy respite. 

And finally, as if all those factors weren’t enough, there’s the limitless demands to gather more and more information. Professionals are constantly scrambling to pull together data, intel, statistics, documentation—all those facts and figures that have become their own vital currency in our knowledge-based economy. 

The Increasing Demand for More Data in the Modern World 

First coined by management consultant Peter Drucker in the 1950s, the term “knowledge worker” refers to highly-trained professionals who utilize specialized expertise, analytical skills, and complex problem-solving to add meaningful and even irreplaceable value to an organization. (The Corporate Finance Institute defines them as “high-level workers who apply theoretical and analytical knowledge, acquired through formal training, to develop products and services.”) 

Knowledge workers are a broad category that encompass scientists, programmers, architects, lawyers, and engineers, among other professions. Because of the level of importance the modern era places on technological innovation, scientific discovery, and highly sophisticated engineering fields, the 21st century has seen rapid growth in the ranks of knowledge workers. 

Knowledge workers are a broad category that encompass scientists, programmers, architects, lawyers, and engineers, among other professions.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the brisk expansion of this professional class over the past two decades has been mirrored by a commensurate increase in the demand for information. Recent reports from business firms and technology companies testify to the fact that professionals—many of them almost certainly knowledge workers—are surrendering great swaths of their working hours to researching, seeking out, and pulling together information. 

How Much Time Are You Wasting Each Day?

A 2021 study by artificial intelligence company Glean found that American employees are spending an average of two hours a day—or 25% of their total workweeks—looking for documents, information, or individuals they need to carry out their jobs. 

A more recent study by software firm Coveo encountered respondents allocating even more time to this pursuit. In its 2022 Workplace Relevance Report, the company reported that the average employee “now spends 3.6 hours every day searching for information at work,” a figure that represented an increase of a full hour over the prior year. In summarizing its findings, Coveo painted a grim picture of the consequences of how professionals were utilizing their time. These ineffective research practices, the authors declared, were “draining profits, wasting hours, and leaving employees exhausted and burned out.” 

In its 2022 Workplace Relevance Report, the company reported that the average employee “now spends 3.6 hours every day searching for information at work.”

Why Engineers Might Have it the Worst

This seemingly inescapable time-sink can be especially overwhelming for engineers. These members of the knowledge worker class are tasked with keeping track of a slew of information, including parts, parametric features, cross-references, and compliance regulations that are often sprawled all over the internet. A report conducted by parts management company CADENAS in 2022 found that nearly half of the 100,000+ engineers and designers the firm surveyed spent at least an hour every single day searching for parts. And when you add on all the other types of data these professionals are responsible for on a daily basis, the amount of time they’re committing to researching information critical to executing their jobs is likely on par with the findings from the aforementioned studies. 

A report conducted by parts management company CADENAS in 2022 found that nearly half of the 100,000+ engineers and designers the firm surveyed spent at least an hour every single day searching for parts.

At the risk of overstatement, this is a crippling inefficiency for a field of highly trained experts. Many of these professionals—including systems, design, and NPI engineers—would much rather be innovating on their companies’ product lines and portfolios, delivering newer, better devices and components to their customers and the larger electronics field. 

How Engineers Are Losing Valuable Time Chasing Data

The state of chronic overload detailed by Newport is felt acutely by component engineers. On most days, they’re tasked with a range of interrelated research-based tasks. These responsibilities include validating parts, confirming lifecycles and compliance statuses, and identifying viable cross-references. Many component engineers scour the web to execute on these responsibilities, moving through multiple websites and consulting databases, distributor sites, and other related resources. 

Is It Possible to Quantify Just How Much Time is Being Lost?

Our own internal estimates at Z2Data shed light on how much time component engineers are committing to these functions. Based on our research, validating a part, identifying its lifecycle status, and confirming whether it’s RoHS compliant each takes about three minutes (assuming no distractions from coworkers, social media, or anything else). Sure, that might not seem like a substantial time investment on its face. But if we assume that an engineer is carrying out each of these searches roughly five times every day—arguably a conservative assessment—then they’ve already lost 45 minutes to casting around for this data. Add in comparable tasks like parametric searches, cross-references, and side-by-side comparisons, while also allowing for the fact that some parts will be harder to find data on, and that figure easily doubles. 

But if we assume that an engineer is carrying out each of these searches roughly five times every day—arguably a conservative assessment—then they’ve already lost 45 minutes to casting around for this data.

Why Cross Reference Searching is an Exercise in Inefficiency

Let’s take searching for cross-references as an example. When a component engineer receives a PCN that a specific component is reaching end-of-life—or, less frequently, learns that it’s no longer in full regulatory compliance—they need to seek out crosses. In order to do that, engineers often search far and wide across the internet, gleaning manufacturers’ sites, distributor sites like Digikey and Arrow Electronics, and even, in some cases, competitors’ pages to try to pinpoint viable crosses. Once they’ve found a promising candidate, they need to download that specific component’s data sheet, often a PDF file. Finally, they must carefully pore over all the specifications on the data sheet to ensure that the cross-reference fits the form, fit, and function of its predecessor. 

In order to do that, engineers often search far and wide across the internet, gleaning manufacturers’ sites, distributor sites like Digikey and Arrow Electronics, and even, in some cases, competitors’ pages to try to pinpoint viable crosses.

Depending on the parametric features the engineer is looking for, researching crosses can be a long and laborious process. Z2Data estimates that challenging cross-references can take around 15 minutes to find via a traditional web search. When executed multiple times over the course of a workweek, the task of locating crosses can become a significant drain on resources, stagnating processes that should be brisk and seamless and even gumming up manufacturing timelines. No matter the company you work for or the product you’re updating a bill of materials for, there’s little disputing the fact that this method for finding cross-references is a cluttered, haphazard technique for going about what should be a clean, systematic operation. The inevitable result is a highly skilled knowledge worker engulfed in repetitive drudgery and mind-numbing busyness, and prevented from reaching a higher, more optimized level of productivity.  

When executed multiple times over the course of a workweek, the task of locating crosses can become a significant drain on resources, stagnating processes that should be brisk and seamless and even gumming up manufacturing timelines.

Freeing Engineers from Endless Components Research 

In his research into our age of incessant busywork and the trivial but cumulative mental load being heaped on knowledge workers, Cal Newport often cites examples of talented, diligent professionals that were afforded the luxury of an alternative path. When he was pursuing a PhD at MIT in the 2000s, Newport found himself in the company of an idiosyncratic coterie of brilliant computer scientists and mathematicians. These individuals, whose accolades ran a prestigious gamut ranging from MacArthur “genius” grants to Turing Awards, embraced “the idea of taking your time to find the right idea.” They had room to breathe, consider, imagine, and the results spoke for themselves. Newport’s publications are littered with references to highly successful professionals—scientists, technologists, journalists—who gave themselves the bandwidth to engage in serious critical thinking for extended periods of time. This broadened cognitive availability allowed them to maximize their intellectual potential, yielding a multitude of illustrious achievements.

“Too many of us undervalue concentration,” Newport wrote recently, substituting “busyness for real productivity.” For many engineers, however, the situation is more nuanced. These professionals are not embracing busyness; they’re under siege by it. That shallow alternative to “real productivity” is an inescapable part of daily requirements that include carefully perusing data sheets, carrying out validations and risk analyses, and securing usable crosses. Many of these engineers are not aware of a readily apparent solution that would free up their time and allow them to engage in the kind of high-level design and conceptual work that could bring deeper, more enduring value to their companies. 

For many engineers, however, the situation is more nuanced. These professionals are not embracing busyness; they’re under siege by it.

To get to that point, the electronics industry and the engineers who sustain it need to identify and adopt—en masse—a more efficient, optimized way of searching for crosses, lifecycle status, regulatory compliance, and everything else related to electronic components. 

To get to that point, the electronics industry and the engineers who sustain it need to identify and adopt—en masse—a more efficient, optimized way of searching for crosses, lifecycle status, regulatory compliance, and everything else related to electronic components. 

If engineers can formalize a newer, better methodology for this research and clean up an inefficiency that’s trapping them in a quagmire of cross-references and other lower-order tasks, they’ll be more effective knowledge workers and greater assets to their companies. And in some cases, they’ll have more time to dedicate to the type of rewarding, stimulating work that left Newport awestruck at MIT—endeavors that require assiduous effort but not endless toiling, and that result in serious, lasting intellectual contributions to companies, fields, and even entire industries.