Work about work is eating your company

There's a useful concept from Asana's research that deserves wider adoption: "work about work." It refers to all the activities that surround productive work but don't constitute it: searching for documents, switching between applications, communicating about tasks, attending status meetings, managing priorities, and tracking down decisions that were made but not recorded.

The average knowledge worker spends 60% of their time on work about work and 40% on the skilled, strategic work they were actually hired to do. For most companies, this ratio is so normalised that nobody questions it. Of course you spend time in meetings. Of course you search for documents. Of course you attend standups. These activities feel like part of the job rather than overhead imposed on the job.

But if you reframed it as a manufacturing problem, the absurdity would be immediate. Imagine a factory where the workers spend 60% of their time locating tools, attending shift meetings, and checking with colleagues about what to build next, and only 40% of their time actually building things. No operations manager would accept that ratio. They'd redesign the factory floor.

The knowledge work equivalent of redesigning the factory floor is redesigning the information infrastructure that knowledge workers operate within. And unlike most productivity interventions, which target the 40% (better focus techniques, time management, deep work practices), this one targets the 60%, which is where the real opportunity sits.

The activities that make up the 60%

The work-about-work category breaks down into specific activities, each of which has a root cause and a structural fix.

Communicating about work (352 hours/year). Emails, Slack messages, and conversations about what's happening, what needs to happen, and who's doing what. Much of this communication exists because status and context aren't documented anywhere persistent and searchable. The information is shared synchronously because there's no asynchronous alternative.

Duplicative work (209 hours/year). Recreating documents, research, and analysis that already exist somewhere in the organisation but can't be found. Fourteen percent of knowledge worker time goes to rebuilding things that someone else has already built, because the original is buried in a tool that the current worker doesn't know about or can't search.

Unnecessary meetings (103 hours/year). Meetings that participants themselves consider unproductive, primarily status updates and context-sharing sessions that could be handled by documentation. The meeting load has doubled since 2019 despite widespread awareness of the problem.

Searching for information. Knowledge workers spend 21% of their time looking for information and toggle between apps 1,200 times per day (HBR). Each toggle carries a cognitive recovery cost. The aggregate: roughly a full working day per week lost to finding things rather than using them.

Managing priorities. Tracking shifting deadlines, renegotiating commitments, updating stakeholders on changes. This overhead grows with organisational complexity and is amplified by information silos that prevent visibility across teams.

Why productivity initiatives miss the target

Most corporate productivity initiatives focus on helping individuals work better within the existing 40%: better focus techniques, time management training, distraction-blocking tools, deep work practices. These are valuable, but they're optimising the minority of time while leaving the majority untouched.

The bigger opportunity is structural: reducing the 60% so that more time is available for the skilled work. If you could shift the ratio from 60/40 to 50/50, you'd effectively gain a day of productive work per person per week, without hiring anyone, without anyone working longer hours, and without any individual behaviour change.

The structural changes that produce this shift are well-understood:

Documentation that writes itself from existing activity (PRs, Slack, meetings) reduces the communication overhead by making context available without requiring synchronous sharing.

Semantic search across all tools reduces search time and eliminates duplicate work by making existing knowledge findable regardless of where it was created.

Async-first processes with documented decisions reduce meeting load by handling context transfer and routine decisions through written channels.

Connected tools reduce app-switching overhead by bringing fragmented knowledge into one searchable layer.

None of these require individual behaviour change. They're infrastructure investments that change the ratio for everyone.

Measuring the shift

If you want to quantify the work-about-work ratio in your organisation, track these metrics for a two-week sample:

Meeting hours per person per week. Separate informational meetings (status, context-sharing) from productive meetings (decisions, creative work). The informational meetings are the ones that documentation should replace.

"Does anyone know...?" messages per week in Slack. Each one is a symptom of unfindable knowledge. Track the frequency and the response time.

Time to find information. Ask team members to log, for one week, how long it takes them to find specific documents or information when they need it. The average is usually higher than anyone expects.

Duplicate work incidents. How often does someone create something that already existed elsewhere in the organisation? Even tracking this informally produces useful data.

The baseline measurement makes the ROI of infrastructure investment concrete: if the 60% drops to 50% for a 50-person team averaging $100,000/year, the recovered productivity is equivalent to hiring five additional people.

Frequently asked questions

Is this really a solvable problem or just the nature of knowledge work? Some coordination is inherent to collaborative work and will always exist. But the current ratio (60/40) is not the minimum achievable level; it's the level that current infrastructure produces. Teams with strong documentation, good search, and async-first cultures consistently report ratios closer to 50/50 or even 45/55. The floor isn't zero, but it's well below where most teams currently sit.

Won't reducing communication make teams less collaborative? Reducing unnecessary communication (status updates, context-sharing, repeated explanations) frees time for more valuable communication (creative discussion, problem-solving, relationship building). The goal is better collaboration, not less of it.

Where should we start? Start with the component that's most obviously wasteful: usually meeting overload or search overhead. Connect your knowledge sources to one searchable layer, introduce self-writing documentation, and audit your recurring meetings against the meeting-or-doc framework.

Related reading: The coordination tax, The knowledge scaling problem, How to reduce meetings, The cost of scattered knowledge. Related pages: Self-writing docs, One search, Connections.