Modern leadership is under siege, not always by external challenges, but by internal inefficiencies. Leaders are often pulled away from their most important responsibilities: strategy, innovation, culture building, and guiding their teams toward growth. Instead, too much of their time is spent on coordination, meetings, chasing status updates, and putting out fires. This kind of burden, what many call “work about work,” erodes a leader’s ability to lead with clarity.
What Is “Work About Work” and How Much Time It Takes
“Work about work” refers to tasks and activities that do not directly contribute to the core mission or strategic responsibilities of a leader but are required by the organizational design, processes, or communication overload. Examples include:
- Chasing updates and status reports
- Scheduling, rescheduling, managing calendars
- Switching between tools or apps to find information
- Responding to constant messages that are not urgent
- Organizing meetings that may not have clear outcomes
So how much of the workweek does this actually take?
- According to Asana’s 2022 Anatomy of Work Index, knowledge workers globally spend 58% of their time on “work about work” rather than on the core role they were hired for. For managers, it’s even worse: about 62% of their days are consumed by it.
- This includes things like repeated switching between apps, gathering status, attending unnecessary meetings, navigating inefficient processes.
The magnitude of this is staggering: more than half of what many leaders and knowledge workers believe is “productive time” is not actually being spent on high-value work.
Why It Matters: The Hidden Cost of Being Bogged Down
When leaders are overloaded with low-value but high-frequency tasks, several things happen:
- Strategic Drift. You’re meant to be setting vision, seeing trends, making big decisions, but you’ve got less bandwidth. Priorities become reactive rather than proactive. There is less time to think longer term, explore innovation, or anticipate change.
- Slower Decision-Making. Constant coordination, meeting choreography, follow ups, and waiting for inputs slows things down. The cycle from idea to execution gets stretched.
- Team Performance and Morale Takes a Hit. When leaders are tied up, teams often feel less supported. Feedback and coaching may be superficial because there isn’t time. Bottlenecks form. Also, when employees see their leaders drowning in administrative busywork, it can reduce motivation and clarity about purpose.
- Burnout and Stress. The friction of switching between many small coordination tasks, the mental load of juggling details, and the feeling of being always “on” with messages and meetings leak into stress and reduce resilience. For leaders, this is dangerous because when they burn out, the effects reverberate broadly.
- Opportunity Cost. Every hour spent on low value tasks is an hour not spent on strategy, building culture, exploring markets, or developing others. Growth, innovation, customer relationships all suffer.
Evidence: Why Freeing Up Leader Time Is Not Optional
There is strong empirical evidence that when leaders and teams are not bogged down, performance improves in big, measurable ways.
- Asana’s “Work About Work” data confirms what many feel intuitively: the more time people spend on coordination and low leverage tasks, the less time is left for strategic, innovative, and skilled work.
- Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that employees now spend 57% of their time in meetings and email, leaving less than half their week for focus work and innovation.
- Gallup studies on engagement and profitability show that highly engaged business units earn about 23% higher profitability than less engaged ones.
- Gallup also finds that high engagement teams deliver other advantages: lower absenteeism (78% less), significantly higher productivity, lower turnover, better customer loyalty, fewer defects or safety issues.
These statistics are not about seat time or being busy. They are about outcomes. And outcomes are what leadership is paid for.
How Business Partners Can Shift the Dynamic
What is a Business Partner in this context? Here, I mean a role specifically tasked with:
- Handling recurring workflows, follow ups, coordination
- Managing calendars so that leadership’s time is aligned with strategic priorities
- Preparing decision materials, gathering necessary inputs, so when leaders engage, they engage with clarity
- Acting as a buffer for communication overload by filtering, triaging, escalating
- Helping set systems or process improvements so that “work about work” is minimized
Here are specific ways Business Partners help:
What Leaders Lose by Not Taking Action
If leaders don’t address “work about work,” there are compounding negative effects:
- Cumulative inefficiency: Even small coordination tasks add up. Over weeks and months, these hours translate into lost strategic potential.
- Strategy erosion: If time for reflection, market scanning, and innovation is squeezed out, an organization can lose competitive edge.
- Lower employee engagement: Teams look to leaders not just for direction but modeled behaviors. If leaders are always reactive and overly burdened, visibility is low and that diminishes trust and engagement.
- Higher turnover costs both among leadership and in the broader team.
- Reduced profitability and growth as empirical studies show.
Practical Steps to Reduce “Work About Work”
It’s one thing to say “stop doing work about work.” It’s another to change the machinery of how you lead day to day. Here are steps that can make a difference.
- Audit Your Time. Track a few weeks: how many hours are in meetings, follow ups, status updates versus deep work, decisions, strategy. Be honest about what is actually moving the needle.
- Define High Value Leadership Activities. Clarify: what only you as a leader should spend your time on? For example: setting vision, mentorship, making critical decisions, culture. Anything else should be considered for delegation or removal.
- Implement a Business Partner or Support Role. If you don’t already have such a role, consider onboarding someone who can own the enabling work such as calendar, coordination, and prep. If you have one, ensure they have clarity, authority, and access to push back on low value tasks.
- Simplify Decision Protocols and Reporting. Reduce the need for frequent check ins by enabling teams to self manage more, with outcome versus process based reports. Use dashboards and status summaries rather than constant meetings.
- Set Meeting Rules. For example, only meetings with agendas and required outcomes get scheduled. Protect focus blocks in your calendar. Limit meeting lengths. Discourage “status updates” that could be done asynchronously through email or shared docs.
- Reduce Tool Overload and Communication Noise. Standardize what apps or tools are used. Limit notifications. Set expectations for response times such as non urgent messages only responded in certain windows.
- Regular Reflection and Iteration. Once changes are made, measure again. Ask: did we reclaim time? Did decisions speed up? Are teams less frustrated? Be ready to tweak.
A Call to Action
Leaders are not assets to be micromanaged. They are multipliers. Their influence, decisions, vision, and mentorship ripple through every layer of the organization. But leaders only multiply well if they have space: mental space, time, clarity.
If you’re in leadership today, ask yourself: is more of your schedule determined by urgent low value items than by important high value ones? If yes, something needs to shift.
That’s where Business Partners come in: not merely as assistants, but as strategic enablers. They shift the load, filter the noise, and free up leadership to lead, not to administrate.
About Nytebird
Nytebird provides dedicated Business Partners who give leaders back their time and energy. We handle execution so you can focus on strategy, growth, and results.
Visit www.Nytebird.com to find the right Business Partner who will help you soar.