Busywork

Work about work: naming the thing that eats your calendar.

Asana measured it at 58% of the day. What falls inside the definition, why naming it changes behavior, and how teams shrink it.

By Mathias CelisMarch 24, 20265 min readLast updated July 2026

TL;DR

'Work about work' is Asana's term for coordination that produces no output: status updates, chasing approvals, searching for documents, sitting in alignment meetings, processing email about all of it. Their Anatomy of Work research measures it at 58% of the average workday. Naming it matters because unnamed costs never get budgeted or cut.

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.

Frequently asked questions

What does 'work about work' mean?

Asana's Anatomy of Work research defines it as the coordination surrounding actual work: communicating about tasks, searching for information, switching between apps, chasing statuses, and sitting in meetings about the work. Their surveys put it at 58% of the workday.

Why don't companies notice this cost?

Because it hides inside every job description rather than appearing as a line item. No one is titled Chief Status Chaser; everyone just does forty minutes of it daily. Distributed evenly and named nowhere, it never gets budgeted, measured, or cut.

What reduces work about work fastest?

Making commitments visible (a shared list of who owes what kills most status-asking), replacing standing meetings with written updates, and automating the tracking-and-chasing layer of email, which is the single biggest chunk and the part tools like Pidgy absorb.