Every manager suspects their team drowns in coordination; almost none can say how much, which is why busywork survives every reorganization. The playbook below fixes that in three moves: measure one week, cut the top three sources, automate the chasing. Notably absent: a new recurring meeting to discuss it.
Move 1: Measure one week
For five working days, everyone tags their calendar blocks and task time with one of two labels: output (produced something a client or the product touches) or coordination (communicated about, searched for, chased, or reported on work). A shared spreadsheet is plenty. Expect the coordination share to land between 50 and 60 percent, consistent with Asana's Anatomy of Work research, and expect the number to shock people who guessed 20. The shock is the point; it creates the mandate for the next move.
Move 2: Cut the top three sources
The measurement week names your specific top three, but the same suspects appear on most teams:
- Status meetings. Replace the recurring sync with a written two-line update (done, next, blocked) posted by an agreed time. Keep a meeting only for the blocked items. Typical saving: two to four hours per person per week.
- Cc-storms. Adopt one norm: cc means FYI-only, no reply expected, no action implied. Half the team's inbox volume is other people's insurance policies; the norm cancels them.
- Document hunting. One canonical location per project, linked from wherever work is discussed. "Where's the latest version" should be a dead question.
Move 3: Automate the chasing layer
What remains after the cuts is tracking: who owes what, what's gone quiet, who needs the reminder. It's the most mechanical work professionals do, the most resented, and the most error-prone when it runs on memory, because dropped follow-ups fail silently until a deadline exposes them. This layer automates almost entirely: Pidgy builds each person's waiting-for list from their sent mail, flags what's stale, and drafts the chaser for one-click approval. The team keeps the judgment; the machine keeps the ledger.
Re-run the measurement a month later. Teams that execute all three moves typically reclaim several hours per person per week, without anyone working faster, because the win was never speed. It was subtraction. The individual-scale version of this argument is in the busywork tax, and the interruption science behind it in context switching.
