5 minutes read

If work has become faster than ever, why does it feel more exhausting than ever?

This is the question I explored during my closing keynote at @ Human × AI, part of ViennaUP recently. We spent a day talking about artificial intelligence, automation and productivity. Yet one uncomfortable conclusion kept surfacing:

We’re not overwhelmed because we have too much work. We’re overwhelmed because we have too much work about work.

The term was popularised by Asana’s Anatomy of Work research and has since become one of the most important concepts in organisational effectiveness. It describes everything employees do to coordinate work instead of actually doing it: meetings, status updates, reporting, chasing approvals, switching between tools, searching for information and managing endless communication.

And the numbers should concern every leader.

According to Asana’s latest State of AI at Work research, knowledge workers still spend more than half of their working week coordinating work rather than creating value. AI has accelerated many individual tasks, but it hasn’t fundamentally simplified the way organisations operate. In many companies, people are simply completing administrative work faster – while the amount of administrative work keeps growing.

Technology has become smarter, but this doesn’t automatically make organisations better.

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It doesn’t happen overnight.

No organisation wakes up one morning and decides to become unnecessarily complicated.

Complexity arrives quietly – one new approval, an additional dashboard, one more recurring meeting, a new reporting template, and then another communication channel.

None of these decisions seems unreasonable on its own but together, they slowly transform organisations into places where people spend more time managing work than creating value.

The irony is almost painful: many companies invest millions in innovation while quietly building internal systems that make innovation harder every single month.

Does this sound familiar?

It’s Monday morning – you join your first meeting, and the purpose is to prepare for another meeting later this week. During the meeting, someone asks for a presentation. The presentation requires data. The data sits in three different systems. You message Finance. Finance asks Operations. Operations asks IT. Meanwhile, somebody creates a Teams chat to coordinate the presentation. Someone else starts an email thread “just in case.”

By lunchtime, twelve highly capable professionals have spent hours coordinating work. Almost none of them has actually moved the business forward. Nobody was lazy or incompetent. Everyone was busy – busy building nothing.

The invisible tax on every organisation

Work about work is dangerous because it rarely appears on financial statements. Nobody measures the cost of interrupted concentration or duplicated communication; time to chase unnecessary approvals; or context switching; searching for information or reporting that nobody reads.

Yet these invisible activities quietly consume thousands of productive hours every year.

AI didn’t create this problem but can expose it.

Many leaders expected artificial intelligence to give employees back time.

In reality, AI often finishes one task faster only to make room for two more. The presentation is generated in minutes – then let’s create three versions. The meeting summary is automatic, so let’s have another meeting to discuss the summary. The report takes five minutes instead of fifty, so let’s ask for more reports.

Technology rarely creates organisational complexity, but it can accelerate whatever system already exists.

If the system is cluttered, AI makes clutter faster.

That’s why the biggest opportunity for leaders today isn’t implementing another AI tool. It’s redesigning the organisation that uses it.

The uncomfortable truth

Many organisations have an accumulation problem. Over the years they’ve accumulated processes, meetings, tools, communication channels – yet, very little has ever been intentionally removed.

Because adding feels like progress, while removing feels risky.

Yet every excellent organisation I’ve worked with has eventually discovered the same principle:

Complexity grows naturally. Simplicity has to be designed intentionally.

So where do we start?

This is usually the moment when people expect a checklist of five steps or seven habits.

Unfortunately, organisational design doesn’t work that way.

Every organisation accumulates complexity differently, and there is no universal formula because there is no universal organisation.

In fact, I become sceptical whenever someone promises to “simplify your business in five easy steps.”

Real simplification is an iterative process – you remove something, you observe, you learn, you adjust, then you repeat.

The goal isn’t to make the organisation smaller. It’s to make work clearer.

That journey looks different for every leadership team I work with.

But while redesigning an organisation takes time, every leader can begin by changing their own habits tomorrow morning.

Here are five places to start.

1. Stop producing work nobody uses.

This sounds obvious, but it isn’t.

Ask yourself one simple question before creating any report, presentation or dashboard:

Who will use this to make a decision?

Not who receives it.

Who actually changes behaviour because of it?

If nobody can answer that question, the work probably shouldn’t exist.

2. Replace activity with outcomes.

Too many organisations celebrate movement while what they need to celebrate is progress.

Ask your team less often:

“What have you been working on?”

Ask instead:

“What became better because of your work?”

Those two questions produce completely different conversations.

3. Before adding something new, remove something old.

This may be the simplest organisational rule I’ve ever learned – same as when you buy a new shirt, you should throw away an old one – or your wardrobe will become cluttered and “you will have nothing to wear”.

Every time you introduce a meeting, a report, a business line, a person, ask one more question:

What are we removing?

If the answer is “nothing”, complexity has just increased.

4. Protect people’s attention.

Knowledge workers don’t run out of time but definitely run out of uninterrupted thinking.

Every unnecessary interruption has a cost, context switches steal focus, notifications delay meaningful work.

Protecting attention is no longer an individual productivity skill. It has become a leadership responsibility.

5. Make simplicity everyone’s job.

Many organisations wait for transformation programmes or consultants, or technology.

But complexity is created every day by hundreds of tiny decisions.

The same is true for simplicity.

It becomes part of the culture when every employee feels responsible not only for delivering work, but also for questioning unnecessary work.

The real challenge

If you’re looking for a universal blueprint, I’m afraid there isn’t one. Every organisation carries its own version of work about work. That’s why simplification cannot be copied from another company.

It has to be designed from within. It requires leaders who are willing to question long-established habits. Who are prepared to remove—not only add. Who understand that organisational excellence is rarely about doing more. More often, it’s about having the courage to stop doing what no longer creates value.

That’s the work I spend most of my time doing with leadership teams – removing complexity, questioning what doesn’t work, redesigning how work actually happens. And every single journey looks different.

Excellence Perspective by

Chavdar Vlachkov

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Chavdar, you’ve led large-scale digital transformation programmes across Europe. From your perspective, where do you see “work about work” creating the biggest barriers to transformation and what is one piece of advice you would give leaders trying to reduce it?

The best way to avoid the “work about work” trap is through genuine top-down empowerment. The people leading a transformation shouldn’t just be responsible for aligning stakeholders – they need the authority to make recommendations, take decisions, and push execution in the best interest of the programme, also delegate that authority downwards to the middle management that is highly effective.

Put simply, programme leaders need a “license to kill” – the authority to eliminate unnecessary conversations, remove inefficiencies, occasionally ruffle a few feathers, but always in service of the programme’s objectives and agreed outcomes. Once done they need to keep their leaders informed, so they can deal with any backlash.

One of the first things I do when taking over a large programme with many stakeholders is establish its drumbeat: who meets whom, how often, and for what purpose. After a month or two, once everyone is onboarded, I revisit it and make it more conservative. Most programmes naturally accumulate meetings and reporting layers over time, and very few ever stop to remove them.

And one final recommendation: keep one genuinely impatient person close to you. They’ll spot redundancies and unnecessary processes long before everyone else does and trust me they will make you aware!