Why Finance Teams Can Only Focus 41 Minutes on Repetitive Work — And What It's Costing Them
It's not a discipline problem. Attention on genuinely repetitive tasks has a physiological limit, and finance work runs into it constantly.
Medius commissioned research specifically on how repetitive work affects finance professionals, and the numbers are more specific than the usual "automation improves productivity" framing. Finance professionals surveyed maintain focus for an average of 41 minutes on repetitive tasks before their attention drifts. They spend more than 3.5 hours a day — over 23 working weeks a year — on tasks that could plausibly be automated. And 96% admitted that lack of focus during repetitive work has led to real, costly mistakes.
What that actually costs
- 52% reported increased rework costs from errors made during repetitive tasks.
- 51% said it had reduced client or supplier trust.
- 44% linked errors directly to lost revenue.
- The research estimates the aggregate productivity impact of this kind of "boring work" at up to $1.4 trillion across US businesses.
- 74% of finance professionals surveyed said they were considering leaving the profession, and monotony was part of why.
Why "focus harder" isn't a real answer
It's tempting to read a 41-minute average as a discipline problem — as if the fix is asking people to concentrate better. That's not how sustained attention on low-variation, repetitive tasks actually works. Attention on genuinely repetitive work degrades predictably over time regardless of how conscientious the person doing it is; it's closer to a physiological limit than a character trait. Asking someone to will their way past it just produces the errors the research describes.
What actually changes it
The lever that works isn't motivating people to focus harder on repetitive decisions — it's reducing how many purely repetitive decisions a person has to make in the first place, so the attention they do have goes toward the parts of the job that actually need judgment: an ambiguous exception, a customer relationship, a policy call. That's also, not coincidentally, exactly what 49% of CFOs told Deloitte was their top finance-talent priority for 2026 — automating processes specifically to free people up for higher-value work, not automating for its own sake.
How Vyomiyra helps
Vyomiyra is built around that same idea: take the repetitive, low-judgment steps of AP and AR out of a person's day, and leave the decisions that actually need a person's attention — an exception, an approval call, a collections conversation — as the thing they're spending their focus on.