Genuine question: how much of your team's week is actually spent on "work about work" - and have you found anything that fixes it?

I've been sitting with a number that bothers me, and I want to know if your experience matches it or not.

Asana's research says 58% of knowledge workers' time goes to "work about work" - the status updates, the chasing, the copying data between tools, the reports nobody actually reads. Not the work. The work around the work. McKinsey puts email alone at close to a quarter of the week.

When I first saw those numbers I assumed they were inflated consultant math. Then I actually looked at how my own small team spends its time, and it was worse than I wanted to admit. A real chunk of every week was going to:

1/ someone pinging someone else for a status that already existed in a tool nobody checks
2/ the same three numbers getting manually pulled into a Friday update
follow-ups that slipped because they lived in one person's head
3/ context living in Slack, tasks in a tracker, data in a sheet, and no one holding the thread between them

None of it is hard. All of it is expensive. And the weird part is that most teams I talk to have just… accepted it as the cost of doing business. It sits on the P&L quietly and nobody treats it as a problem you're allowed to solve.

So here's what I actually want to hear from you:

If you had to guess, what % of your team's week goes to work-about-work vs. actual output? Gut number is fine.

Have you tried to fix it, and did anything actually stick? (Templates, a Notion process, an ops hire, an automation, a ritual?) I'm especially interested in the things that didn't work.

Is this even a real problem for you, or is it a big-company problem that solo founders and small teams don't feel?

I'm asking partly because I keep getting different answers depending on team size, and I can't tell yet where the line is. My hunch is it barely exists at 1–2 people, becomes painful around 5–10, and turns into a full-time coordination tax past that, but I'd rather be corrected by people living it than trust my own hunch.

Full disclosure so this isn't a stealth pitch: I'm building something in this space - an AI coworker that sits inside Slack and takes the operational layer off a team's plate (the reports, the follow-ups, the pulling-data-together part). So I'm not a neutral observer. But I'm genuinely more interested right now in whether the problem is as real and as widespread as those numbers suggest than in talking about what I'm building. If the answer is "no, teams have basically solved this," that's the most useful thing I could learn today.

What's your honest number?