Asana's Anatomy of Work index surveys around ten thousand knowledge workers a year, and its headline finding barely moves between editions: 58% of the workday goes to "work about work." Not the job itself, and not meetings about strategy either. The connective tissue: communicating about tasks, chasing statuses, searching for documents, switching between apps, and processing the email generated by all of the above.
Why the term matters
Naming things changes what organizations can see. Nobody's job description says Chief Status Chaser, so the cost appears on no budget line; it's just forty minutes here and an hour there, distributed across everyone, labeled as nothing. Asana's contribution was less the number than the noun: once "work about work" exists as a category, it can be measured, compared, and cut. Unnamed costs are immortal.
What falls inside the definition
- Writing and answering status requests ("any update on this?")
- Searching for the document, the decision, or the latest version
- Forwarding, cc'ing, and otherwise routing information between humans
- Meetings whose output is alignment about the work rather than work
- Reminding people of the things they owe, and being reminded
Notice how much of the list is email-shaped. That's not an accident; email is where coordination lives, which is why McKinsey's 28%-of-the-workweek email figure and Asana's 58% overlap heavily rather than stacking.
Shrinking it, structurally
Individual discipline barely touches a structural cost, but three structural moves do. Make commitments visible in one shared place, which deletes most status-asking at the source. Replace standing status meetings with two-line written updates. And automate the tracking-and-chasing layer, the most mechanical slice: knowing who owes what, noticing what's overdue, sending the nudge. That slice is what Pidgy absorbs from each person's inbox, and it's the right first target because it's both the most resented busywork and the most error-prone when done by memory.
The diagnosis chapter of this problem is where 58% actually goes; the manager's version, with a measurement week and a playbook, is here.
