The most distracting apps at work haven’t changed since 2022. The productive ones have—here’s what the data shows
Distracting apps have made even the best of us stumble.
You open your laptop with the most productive of intentions. You have a plan. You have a list. You have a very important deadline. And then, somewhere between refreshing your inbox and watching one quick video, the morning is gone. Sound familiar?
We’ve all been there, which is why, once a year, we look at what DeskTime users are actually doing at their desks—not what they think they’re doing, and not what anyone wishes they were doing.
As part of this study, we pulled data from 50,000+ active DeskTime users and listed their most used productive and unproductive websites and apps in 2025.
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1. What this data is—and what it isn’t
A quick explainer before we get into the data. This isn’t a list of apps that are objectively good or bad for productivity, but a snapshot of which apps DeskTime users spent the most tracked time in last year, sorted by how those users’ organizations had them categorized.
In DeskTime, managers and account admins set the productive/unproductive classification themselves, based on what makes sense for their industry and workflow. A social media manager’s YouTube session looks different from an accountant’s, i.e. one may have YouTube as a productive app and the latter as an unproductive one.
The reality is messier than either label fully captures, but the overall picture has proven to be deeply fascinating year after year, so, without further ado, here are the latest numbers.
2. The productive apps: Microsoft tightens its grip
Top 10 productive apps of 2025 (by total usage across DeskTime users) compared to previous years:
| # | 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | MS Teams | MS Outlook | MS Outlook | MS Outlook |
| 2 | MS Outlook | Gmail | MS Teams | |
| 3 | MS Excel | Google Docs | MS Excel | MS Teams |
| 4 | MS Remote Desktop | MS Excel | Gmail | MS Excel |
| 5 | Gmail | VS Code | Google Docs | Google Docs |
| 6 | Google Docs | MS Teams | MS Remote Office | Gmail |
| 7 | VS Code | Windows Explorer | Slack | |
| 8 | MS Word | MS Remote Desktop | MS Word | MS Word |
| 9 | Slack | Slack | Slack | Skype |
| 10 | MS Word | Skype | MS Remote Office |
The 2025 runners-up are Google Meet and ChatGPT.
The Microsoft ecosystem continues to define what “productive” looks like for the majority of DeskTime users. Six of the top ten slots belong to Microsoft products—a dominance that has held consistently across every year of this study.
The more interesting story is in the movement. Microsoft Teams rises to the #1 position in 2025, having slipped to #6 in 2024 after 2023’s high of #2. This yo-yo pattern in Teams’ ranking has been cause for ongoing speculation. In 2024, we noted that its drop might signal a big push for RTO policies. But the 2025 rebound suggests the picture is more complicated.
Why is MS Teams the most used productive app of 2025? Two potential reasons come to mind:
Firstly, the professional world has fully given into remote meetings, i.e. while many of us have returned to offices, the meetings have remained digital. Whether it’s remote or hybrid teams, sales calls, client meetings, or even interdepartmental meetings, it’s become commonplace to just hop on a call, instead of going in-person.
Secondly, for those unfamiliar—Teams is more than just a videoconferencing platform. It includes workplace messaging, file sharing, and project management features, while integrating with the broader Microsoft ecosystem. Accordingly, it’s an invaluable knowledge base for any company’s AI integration efforts. Microsoft has been aggressive about weaving Copilot—its AI—throughout the Teams experience, and companies might be increasingly centralizing their communications and data there to make the most of it.
As to the rest of the top 10, it mostly tells the story of the usual push-and-pull between Microsoft and Google ecosystems. Interestingly, WhatsApp has made the cut, likely due to DeskTime’s increasingly international user base.
But perhaps the biggest curiosity after Teams’ climb to the top is MS Remote Desktop’s rise to #4. One likely explanation is that returning to the office doesn’t mean returning to a single machine. Employees working across locations—office, home, travel—increasingly rely on remote desktop tools to access a consistent work environment wherever they are.
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3. The distracting apps: YouTube continues to reign supreme
Top 10 distracting apps of 2025 (by total usage across DeskTime users) compared to previous years:
| # | 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | YouTube | YouTube | YouTube | YouTube |
| 2 | ||||
| 3 | ||||
| 4 | ChatGPT | DeskTime | Skype | Netflix |
| 5 | Google Docs | ChatGPT | Netflix | Spotify |
| 6 | Netflix | Spotify | MS Teams | Skype |
| 7 | DeskTime | Gmail | Slack | Twitter (X) |
| 8 | Spotify | Amazon | Spotify | Slack |
| 9 | Gmail | Netflix | Gmail | Amazon |
| 10 | MS Teams | Twitter (X) | VLC Media Player |
The runners up for 2025 are LinkedIn and Telegram.
YouTube has led the distracting apps list every single year since DeskTime began publishing this data. 2025 is no different. This is not a trend—at this point, it’s a fixture.
WhatsApp and Facebook hold their positions at #2 and #3, as they have for years. Whatever forces keep these three platforms at the top of the distraction list have proven remarkably durable.
ChatGPT climbs to #4, up from #5 in 2024. In 2023, it barely cracked the top 50 of the unproductive apps list. Two years ago we were speculating whether it would ever make these lists, whereas now it looks to be here to stay.
Do take ChatGPT’s unproductivity label with a grain of salt, since it also appears as a productive apps runner-up, where it has racked up 25x more time—it takes far fewer hours to make the distracting list than the productive one, because people use work tools all day but can only slack off so much.
Accordingly, ChatGPT’s appearance on the unproductive apps list says more about organizational caution than actual behavior.
When it comes to the rest of the top 10, we can see that Instagram drops off the top ten entirely after appearing in 2024. Netflix remains, sitting at #6, up from #9 in 2024. Its presence in this list has been consistent enough across years that it no longer reads as a novelty.
Tools like Google Docs and MS Teams appearing in the distracting apps top are likely due to companies using tools outside of their ecosystem to collaborate with clients or partners, e.g. taking a call on MS Teams despite generally using Google Meet.
4. Year-over-year: What’s shifted since 2022
Looking across 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025, a few broader patterns emerge from the DeskTime user data:
The Microsoft-Google duopoly is structurally stable. The productive apps list has been dominated by these two ecosystems for every year on record. Individual apps move up and down, but the overall landscape doesn’t shift dramatically.
The unproductive apps top three is essentially frozen. YouTube, WhatsApp, and Facebook have occupied the top three slots—in varying order—across all four years. No challenger has come close to displacing them.
AI tools are moving fast. ChatGPT went from barely registering in 2023, to a high position in 2024’s unproductive list, to challenging the top 3 unproductive apps and a productive runner-up in 2025. No other app in the dataset has moved this quickly through the rankings.
Remote and communication tools are volatile. Teams, Slack, Skype, and Google Meet have all shown significant year-to-year movement—more so than any other category.
Final thoughts: Data is the equalizer
Here’s the thing about assumptions around workplace behavior: everyone has them, and they’re frequently wrong in both directions. Managers who assume their teams are highly distracted may find the numbers tell a more nuanced story. Teams who feel underproductive may be performing better than they think, and vice versa.
Data is the equalizer that removes the guesswork from conversations about how time is actually being spent, and replaces gut feelings with ground truth.
That’s what this annual study is built on—and it’s what DeskTime is built to provide. When managers and employees are looking at the same numbers, the conversation about digital habits becomes a lot more productive than when they’re each working from their own assumptions.
If that’s something your team needs—an automatic time tracking and productivity app that reveals what’s really going on—check out what DeskTime can do for you.
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