Ask anyone in an office what their biggest frustration is and you’ll get one of three answers: meetings, emails, or the general feeling of being busy all day without actually doing anything meaningful.

They’re not wrong. The average knowledge worker spends about 60% of their time on what Asana’s Work Index calls “work about work” — status updates, searching for information, switching between tools, and sitting in meetings that could’ve been a two-line message.

That’s not a productivity problem. It’s a structural one.

The Meeting Epidemic

Let’s start with the obvious one. Meetings have multiplied since the shift to remote and hybrid work. What used to be a quick chat at someone’s desk became a calendar invite. And once it’s on the calendar, it tends to stay there. Forever.

The average professional now sits in 15-20 meetings per week. Some of those are necessary. Many are not. The recurring status update where everyone takes turns reading from a project tracker? That’s a meeting that should be an async update. The “quick sync” that runs for 45 minutes because nobody defined an agenda? That’s a meeting that should’ve been a Slack message.

Here’s a simple test: if everyone in the meeting could get the same outcome by reading a document, you don’t need the meeting. Cancel it. Free up the time. Watch productivity improve.

The Approval Chain That Goes Nowhere

Somewhere along the way, many organisations developed approval processes that require three sign-offs for a $200 purchase or four reviewers for a blog post that ten people will read. The intent was governance. The result is bottlenecks.

When I’ve spoken with teams at companies trying to speed things up, the approval chain is almost always one of the first things they flag. Not because governance doesn’t matter — it does — but because the level of oversight often doesn’t match the level of risk.

The team at Team400 have written about this in the context of process automation: the biggest gains often come not from automating the work itself, but from removing unnecessary steps that slow everything down. That resonates with what we’ve seen across industries.

Context Switching Is Killing Focus

You’re writing a report. A Slack notification pops up. You respond. Check email while you’re at it. See a calendar reminder for a meeting in ten minutes. Start preparing. The meeting runs over. You come back to the report and can’t remember where you were.

Sound familiar? Research from the University of California, Irvine found it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption. Multiply that by the dozen-plus interruptions most people face daily, and you’ve lost hours of productive work.

The fix isn’t turning off notifications entirely — that’s not realistic for most roles. But batching communication (checking messages at set intervals rather than in real time), blocking focus time on your calendar, and being intentional about when you’re available versus when you’re heads-down can make a real difference.

The Report Nobody Reads

Every organisation has them. Weekly reports, monthly dashboards, quarterly summaries that get compiled, formatted, circulated, and ignored. They exist because someone once asked for them, and nobody’s had the conversation about whether they’re still useful.

If you’re spending hours producing a report, ask: who reads this? What decisions does it inform? Could the same insight be delivered in a shorter format or pulled on demand from a dashboard?

Most of the time, the answer is that the report could be cut in half — or eliminated entirely — without anyone missing it. But it keeps getting produced because that’s what we’ve always done.

Too Many Tools, Not Enough Systems

We covered tech stack audits in a recent post, but it’s worth repeating here: tool sprawl isn’t just a cost problem. It’s a time problem. Every additional tool means another login, another interface, another place where information might live.

When someone spends fifteen minutes searching for a document because it could be in Google Drive, Confluence, SharePoint, or someone’s desktop, that’s not their fault. It’s an organisational failure. Standardising where things live and how information flows between systems isn’t glamorous, but it directly reduces wasted time.

What Actually Helps

A few things that make a genuine difference:

• Default to async. Not everything needs a real-time conversation. Use written updates, recorded videos, and shared documents as the default. Reserve meetings for discussions that benefit from live interaction.
• Shorten meeting defaults. Change your calendar default from 60 minutes to 25 or 30. You’ll be amazed how much faster people get to the point.
• Audit your recurring meetings. Every quarter, review every recurring invite. If it’s not clearly adding value, cancel it for a trial period and see if anyone notices.
• Reduce approval layers. Match the level of oversight to the level of risk. A routine purchase doesn’t need three sign-offs.
• Protect focus time. Block two-hour windows on your calendar where you’re unavailable. Treat them like meetings — non-negotiable.

The Real Cost

Time wasted in offices isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a competitive disadvantage. While your team is sitting in their fifth meeting of the day, your competitor’s team is shipping product.

The fix doesn’t require a major transformation program. It requires honesty about how time is actually being spent, and the willingness to change habits that aren’t working. That’s harder than it sounds. But it’s worth it.