The instinct when a team feels stretched too thin is almost always the same: find a new tool. A better project tracker, a smarter inbox, an AI assistant that promises to summarize the meeting nobody wanted to attend in the first place. That instinct is understandable, and it is also, according to a growing body of research, largely backwards, because the evidence increasingly shows that adding another system rarely solves a time problem rooted in behavior rather than technology.
The hours worth reclaiming are usually not hiding behind a missing feature. They are sitting inside habits that have quietly become normal: the meeting that could have been a message, the status update nobody reads, the approval chain built for a team twice the current size. None of that gets fixed by better software. It gets fixed by naming the behavior and deciding, deliberately, to stop it.
Where the Hours Are Actually Going
Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index, one of the most extensive ongoing studies of how knowledge workers actually spend their days, found that employees lose roughly 60 percent of their time to what the report calls “work about work,” meaning meetings, status checks, and searching for information rather than the skilled work they were actually hired to do. That number has held remarkably steady across multiple years of the survey, which suggests the problem is structural rather than a passing side effect of any one bad quarter.
Bain & Company’s research on organizational time use puts a sharper point on how quickly this compounds. A single weekly executive committee meeting at one large company, once preparation, cascading briefings, and follow-up were tallied across the organization, consumed 300,000 hours a year, and Bain’s broader research found that a typical manager loses roughly 16 hours a week to unnecessary meetings and email alone, which is close to the reclaimed total this piece is aiming at, sitting in plain sight the entire time.
Why More Tools Tend to Make It Worse
It would be reasonable to assume that better software should shrink these numbers over time, yet the opposite pattern keeps showing up. Asana’s own analysis of the problem points out that many of the tools introduced to fix coordination problems, extra dashboards, additional chat channels, another place to log status, end up creating more coordination work rather than less, simply by giving people one more place to check and one more format to keep updated.
Deloitte’s 2025 research on organizational capacity reaches a nearly identical conclusion from a different angle. Deloitte’s analysis of reclaiming organizational capacity found that employees report spending 41 percent of their day on work that does not contribute to the value their organization creates, and specifically noted that new tools meant to increase productivity often add new layers of complexity instead, more notifications to check, more dashboards to update, more digital busywork stacked on top of the busywork already there.
Microsoft’s own telemetry data tells a compatible story from inside the tools themselves. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index research on the infinite workday found that the average knowledge worker is interrupted every two minutes by a meeting, email, or notification, adding up to 275 disruptions across a single day, a pace that no additional application is likely to slow down and that, in many cases, a new application actively speeds up.
The FutureThink Approach: Naming the Behavior, Not Buying the Fix
FutureThink’s Unlock Simplification Behaviors toolkit starts from the same premise these studies point toward: that the fastest path to reclaiming time is behavioral, not technological. The exercise asks a team to build a simple T-chart, naming a specific time suck at the top, then splitting the page into two columns. The left column captures the complexity behaviors driving that time suck, the habits nobody planned but everyone maintains. The right column captures a single, concrete “I will” statement committing to a new behavior in its place.
The exercise deliberately separates tactics, one-time fixes that solve today’s problem and quietly reappear next quarter, from behaviors, repeatable patterns that keep the time reclaimed once the workshop ends. Teams leave having named exactly when and where they will use the new behavior, which is what turns a good intention into something that survives past the following Monday.
Where Ten Hours Actually Comes From
None of the research above suggests a single dramatic change that unlocks ten hours in one move. It suggests the opposite: several smaller, specific behaviors, each worth an hour or two, that add up quickly once someone bothers to name them. Turning one recurring status meeting into a short written update reclaims an hour. Declining to attend a meeting where a person’s presence adds nothing reclaims another. Setting a rule that a decision gets made by the accountable owner rather than routed through three rounds of email reclaims a third.
FutureThink’s broader Get to the Work That Matters course collection builds this same logic into an ongoing practice rather than a single workshop, because the behaviors that create complexity tend to creep back in once attention moves elsewhere. Ten hours a week is rarely won all at once. It is accumulated, one named behavior at a time, by teams willing to admit that the problem was never the software.
For more information on Navigating Change and Building Agility, visit www.futurethink.com
Sources
- Asana, “Anatomy of Work Index” and “How Work About Work Gets in the Way of Real Work”
- Bain & Company, “This Weekly Meeting Took Up 300,000 Hours a Year”
- Deloitte Insights, “When Work Gets in the Way of Work: Reclaiming Organizational Capacity” (2025 Global Human Capital Trends)
- Microsoft WorkLab, “Breaking Down the Infinite Workday” (2025 Work Trend Index)