Introduction
Today’s pace at work means most teams are overloaded with work unrelated to their main priorities. This phenomenon is called “work about work”: a secret killer of productivity that too many businesses don’t realize.
Are your employees spending too much time on unproductive tasks? Maybe you have work about work, and you don’t even realize it. Work about work is a problem that occurs when employees spend their time on low-value activities such as attending back-to-back meetings, constantly checking email, or sending redundant communication. These activities may look productive at first sight but actually are just taking away from the actual work that grows your business.
What’s scariest is how work-about-work can quietly suck the life out of your team’s productivity. It’s not simply a waste of time but also a source of frustration and burnout, too, which makes it even more difficult to have your team highly engaged and motivated. Understanding and addressing work about work means your team is focused on what matters; better outcomes and productivity.
What is Work About Work?
Work about work is anything that appears to be work but does not constructively relate to key deliverables. Deal means activities that keep a person’s time and energy without really furthering the real work. This means that in place of sticking to major deliverables, the employees get themselves entrapped in busywork to divert attention from the real tasks.
Some very common examples of work about work include:
- Too many meetings: Teams have to invest so much time in meetings, which actually could have been an email or done asynchronously.
- Constantly checking emails: People are always opening and responding to emails; none of those things are urgent or important.
- Too much communication across many platforms: the same message is being said over and over through Slack chatting, emailing, and voice messaging-pointless giving different layers of complication to simple communications.
Studies have highlighted how much time is spent on work about work. For example, according to McKinsey Global Institute, employees spend about 28% of their workweek managing emails. Similarly, Asana’s “Anatomy of Work” report reveals that 60% of knowledge workers’ time is lost to non-productive tasks like redundant communication, meetings, and digital distractions. These figures highlight how work about work takes up valuable time without contributing to key goals, leading to frustration, burnout, and reduced overall productivity.
Why Work About Work Hurts Productivity

Work about work not only kills time but also seriously affects productivity and, in turn, team morale. How that happens with the people and to the business as a whole is explained below:
- Distraction from core tasks:
- Time used up by non-essential activities such as redundant meetings and constant emails is drawing employees away from high-value work that really contributes to business goals.
- This leads to the situation where the important areas are never focused on while workers multitask on the low-priority activities that drive no actual progress of their work.
- Emotional and Psychological Consequences
- Burnout: This is mentally and emotionally exhausting for workers since they have to face work about work time and again.
- Frustration: Workers might feel their effort is a waste; hence, leading to dissatisfaction and reduced engagement.
- Eventually, this will affect morale, and the culture will then be one of disengagement in which workers become demotivated and are no longer valued.
- Team Morale:
- This bleeds into teams when employees are burdened with utterly superfluous work. They become less motivated, and this reflects negatively in the overall drop of energy and enthusiasm of the lot.
- It inhibits innovation, collaboration, or the ability to work toward stated objectives when teams are bogged down with work about work.
- Decreased business performance:
- They become inefficient, hence often fail in execution of day-to-day duties on time because they get indulged in mere distractions that ultimately lower the stride of general productivity and resultantly reflect poorly on business.
- For example, Atlassian’s “State of Teams” report shows that employees waste about 31 hours a month on unproductive meetings that could be utilized toward substantial work.
- Quite evidently, the case study proved that canceling meetings not required and minimizing communications resulted in an overall 30% gain in productivity, thus proving that reduction in work about work drives business success.
Signs Your Team is Struggling with Work About Work
Identifying the signs of work about work is crucial to address the issue before it impacts your team’s productivity and overall morale. Here are some key red flags that indicate your team may be struggling with work about work:
- Prolonged decision-making delays:
- When decisions are taking time to occur, or situations are dragging on, it may be because there are too many meetings or talking. Delays in moving things ahead often occur when the team members get caught up in work about the work, not actually working on the work.
- Drop in engagement and morale:
- A team too swamped with work about work risks disengagement. When employees seem less enthusiastic, appear mentally drained, or are less invested in projects, it might be a signal that they are spending much time on things non-core to get frustrated and less positive.
- Too many meetings or check-ins:
- When teams continually attend meetings or status check-ins that do not add any value, that is a huge indication of work about work. Too many meetings-especially those without an articulated agenda or actionable outcomes-prevent employees from doing their job and use up time that is better utilized productively.
- Lower completion rates of tasks:
- But most likely, your team probably fails to meet due dates or cannot execute the task on time since it gets diverted from work by “work about work”. It gets triggered because of administrative jobs that are inconsequential, duplicate work communication, or probably attending meetings that are uncalled for and takes them away from the high-priority work.
By tracking supported data, you will be able to keep track of these signals and identify them through insight into reports on your team activities. Tivazo time tracking will let you know precisely how much time your team spends on meetings, e-mails, and other low-priority tasks. It does this beautifully in the form of its detailed reports, which very neatly point out where time is being spent and exactly when the work-about-work strikes a blow at productivity. Equipped with that knowledge, you will take action toward ridding yourself and your team of distractions and refocusing on what really matters.
The Impact of Work About Work on Your Bottom Line
Work about work not only wastes time but also takes a direct negative toll on the bottom-line performance of a company. Spending too much time in non-productive activities automatically decreases the time devoted to the main business, resulting in lesser contributions to the company’s growth and profitability. Work about work is leading to wasted time and lost revenues:
- Wasted Time = Lost Revenue:
- For every minute spent on work about work, it is a minute taken away from high-value tasks-execution of projects or strategy development. The more time employees fritter away on redundant meetings, superfluous emails, or unnecessary communications, the less time they are able to concentrate on work that directly contributes toward business goals.
- The McKinsey Global Institute says employees spend 28% of their workweek managing emails, and Anatomy of Work by Asana says 60% of a knowledge worker’s time is lost due to non-productive activities-like work about work. In this way, invaluable hours of work get lost day in and day out, affecting overall productivity and profitability in general.
- Direct financial impact:
- Atlassian’s study reports that employees squander about 31 hours each month in non-productive meetings alone. Calculate this into the average salary per hour amounting to about $50 and one finds that businesses could possibly be losing upwards of $1,500+ monthly per employee in lost employee hours because of unnecessary meetings.
- The case study of Trello has shown that by avoiding excessive meetings and work about work, this company achieved up to a 30% boost in productivity, which positively impacted their bottom line. As a result, this efficiency provided teams with more time focused on innovation and the completion of projects, delivering better business outcomes.
- Lower profitability:
- The delivery of projects in time or attainment of KPIs goes for a toss when teams are bogged down by work about work. Delays and unfinished tasks affect client satisfaction and postpone revenue generation opportunities. Of course, the time used up on work about work means fewer chances for growth, thereby reducing profitability in the end.
- In fact, an article entitled “How to Eliminate Time Wasting” by Harvard Business Review suggests that shaving off time wasted on non-essential tasks could increase a company’s revenue by as much as 10-15%, simply by way of efficiency.
How to Eliminate Work About Work and Drive Productivity within Teams
Eliminating work about work is vital to enhancing the productivity of your teams by freeing them to focus on meaningful work. Below are some actionable ways to avoid distractions and do less work about work.
- Streamline Communication:
- Outline clear communications lines to ensure emails and messages don’t inflate work about work.
- Keep talks brief and focused without having too much back-and-forth killing valuable time.
- Focus on outcomes, not activity:
- Stopwatch time against tasks to find and eliminate work about work.
- Give teams a basis on which to track their own time to empower them to notice when their days are too consumed by work about work.
- Limit unnecessary meetings:
- Assess the necessity for each meeting so that no time is spent on work about work.
- Replace meetings with asynchronous communication or quick status updates to keep time focused on core tasks.
- Utilize tools for time tracking and enhancement of focus, such as Tivazo, in the following ways:
- Use Tivazo to track how much time is spent on various tasks and identify where work about work occurs.
- Performance and time tracking in Tivazo help teams focus on high-priority work and reduce the impact of work about work.
- Set clear expectations and delegate effectively:
- Clearly define expectations to avoid unnecessary tasks that are contributing to work about work.
- Encourage effective delegation to help employees focus on their core responsibilities, reducing distractions and minimizing work about work.
Real-Life Examples: Companies That Overcame Work About Work
Many companies have overcome work about work by streamlining processes and focusing on performance-based metrics. Here are a few examples of how organizations have addressed work about work and increased their productivity:
- Atlassian:
- Had to face work about work challenges brought about by too many meetings and communications.
- Used a “No Meeting Wednesdays” policy to reduce work about work.
- Gave employees more time to focus, uninterrupted, which led to their completing more tasks and becoming much more productive.
- Zapier:
- Suffered from work about work created from unnecessary meetings and communication.
- Go async; minimize meetings and emails.
- Focused on the performance rather than activity; increasing productivity by 20% gave teams the extra space to strategize on real work.
- Basecamp:
- Tackled work about work by limiting the amount of internal communication and negating the requirement for constant check-ins.
- Focused on bringing transparency and prioritization to minimize wasted time on non-core activities.
- By doing this, employees could be more productive by having more time for deep, focused work.
- Tivazo Case Study:
- A mid-sized technology company implemented Tivazo to track the time spent on administrative tasks; to their surprise, it showed that 25% of the workweek was utilized doing work about work.
- As a result of using Tivazo’s time tracking and reporting tools, the firm decreased its inefficiencies by 15% and increased its focus and delivery of projects by 10%.
- Tivazo helped the company identify and reduce work about work, with substantial improvements in productivity.
The Role of Managers in Reducing Work About Work
Managers are supposed to know about and take care of work about work to let their teams be productive. Here’s how managers can contribute to reducing work about work, hence leaving more time for meaningful work:
- Recognize signs of work about work:
- Managers should look ahead and recognize the building signs of work about work: too much meeting, email overload, or the urge for constant status updates.
- It will also be important to monitor those signs so that managers may understand where time is being wasted and thus can take actions to reduce work about work.
- Support employees to focus on high-value tasks:
- Clearly explain to the staff when, depending on the circumstance, their concentration should be channeled toward the work that counts toward the business’ goals and results and when they need to reduce the work about the work.
- Lead them in how they should delegate work so they may focus on the core role.
- Lead a culture of efficiency by the following:
- Create an environment where people have the confidence to say no to jobs or meetings that are just contributors to work about work.
- Encourage productivity tools and workflows that reduce distractions and allow people to focus on substantial work.
- Performance Tracking by Tivazo:
- Tivazo’s team management functionality allows managers to track time consumption on different types of work, which in turn allows for the identification of work about work.
- The Tivazo time tracking and reporting feature allows managers to assess performance against teams, enabling them to pinpoint areas where work about work is occurring, thus aiding remedial action in these areas.
- Spell out expectations and accountability clearly:
- They must spell out expectations concerning productivity and utilization of time in order for them not to be wasting employee time in doing work about work.
- Let the employees take responsibility and ownership of their time and tasks that can be measurable through performance management features within the Tivazo solution.
This will dramatically reduce work about work from managers while letting employees focus on high-priority work.
Tools to Help Your Team Overcome Unproductive Tasks
Overcoming unproductive tasks requires the right tools for time tracking, communication, and overall productivity. Here are some tools that can help teams minimize distractions and focus on meaningful work:

- Tivazo:
- Tivazo is an all-in-one tool designed to track work hours and analyze productivity patterns.
- It gives in-depth reports of how employees spend their time and thus helps the teams to identify and eliminate non-productive activities.
- With features such as real-time tracking, team management, and productivity analytics, Tivazo enables managers to identify inefficiencies and further streamline workflows.
- Trello:
- Trello is a popular project management tool that keeps teams organized through visualization of tasks and deadlines.
- Though it reduces confusion and clutter, it doesn’t provide the in-depth time tracking and productivity insights like Tivazo.
- Trello is good for ironing out communications and managing tasks, but when it comes to deep time management and performance analytics, Tivazo stands apart.
- Asana:
- Asana is another tool of task management on which teams rely to manage their projects and track progress.
- However, it does not possess advanced time tracking to identify unproductive activities and their influence on productivity. While Tivazo provides more detailed insight into time management to help the teams zero in on no-nonsense activities.
- Monday.com:
- Monday.com is a work operating system that comprises tasks, workflows, and project management.
- It can streamline communication and reduce inefficiencies, but it does not specialize in deep time tracking or productivity analytics. Tivazo offers a more tailored approach for identifying and minimizing time spent on non-productive tasks.
- Clockify:
- Clockify is a simple time-tracking tool that helps teams track their work hours and monitor productivity.
- It reduces unproductive activities, but at the same time, it doesn’t have all the reporting options and features of Tivazo when it comes to deeper insights into spending time across different tasks and projects.
Conclusion
Work about work quietly siphons productivity away from your team by causing them to waste time and burn out. The managers can save these missed opportunities by recognizing the need for unnecessary tasks, such as excessive meetings or redundant communication, so the teams can refocus their attention to meaningful work.
Tivazo offers a powerful solution to time tracking, analyzing productivity, and eliminating distractions. Tivazo provides comprehensive time tracking, performance management, and team optimization features that will help managers make informed decisions and create a more productive environment in the workplace.
Want to take productivity into your own hands? Give Tivazo a try and explore how our software can streamline workflows, remove unnecessary activities, and sharpen the focus of your team.Start your free trial or demo today!
FAQ’s:
What is the difference between work about work and actual work?
Work about work: Activities that might support the process of working, but do not contribute to completing core work or realizing project objectives. Examples are unnecessary meetings, constant checking of emails, duplicated communication, and administrative tasks related to the management of things better left automated.
Actual work, in contrast, is the work that directly contributes to the primary goals and objectives of a team or project. It's the work that moves projects forward, produces deliverables, and contributes to the overall business success.
How can I identify work about work in my team?
To identify work about work, look for these signs within your team:
- Excessive meetings: Frequent, unproductive meetings that don't directly contribute to task completion or decision-making.
- Slow Decision Making: Decisions take a lot of time due to over-analysis or irrelevant discussions.
- Low Task Completion Rate: The core task completion rate goes down as too much time is used up in managing administrative work.
- Information Overload: Every team member sending or continuously checking emails/messages rather than focusing on the tasks at hand.
- Less Engagement and Low Morale: Teams feel burned out or disengaged due to non-productive activities.
How does eliminating work about work help with employee burnout?
Eliminating work about work frees people from unnecessary stress and mental fatigue, one of the main reasons for burnout. When employees spend less time on non-productive work, they can then focus on meaningful and goal-oriented work, leading to higher satisfaction, engagement, and a better work-life balance.
Smoothening and minimizing distractions allow employees to have more time and energy to put into their work; as a result, productivity is higher and stress is reduced. In the end, this reduction in stress and the focus on real work combats burnout and leads to a more sustainable work environment.
Can tools like Tivazo help with reducing work about work?
Yes, tools like Tivazo have been created to actually help reduce work about work. Features in Tivazo for time tracking and performance management enable the managers to:
- Track time usage: Tivazo tracks time on tasks and projects, highlighting where distractions or non-productive activities are happening.
- Analyze productivity patterns: Tivazo gives insight into team performance to identify bottlenecks or inefficiencies that lead to work about work.
- Smoothen the working process: Tivazo helps to structure better communication and management of tasks, hence avoiding unnecessary meetings or communications that don't add any value to the work being done.
- Empower the employees-to have a better insight into where time is spent by tracking their own time and tasks, employees will be able to focus on high-impact work.