"Busy Work" May Be a Stand In For Wider Workflow Woes"Busy Work" May Be a Stand In For Wider Workflow Woes

To hear CEOs tell it, they're grappling with a global labor shortage -- one that can be solved via AI. To hear vendors tell it, not only can AI address labor shortages, it can also reduce the amount of dull "busywork" and boost employee productivity.

So Resume Now's Productivity Drains Report, released earlier this week, had a few stats that stood out: 51% of 1,130 U.S. workers surveyed in November 2024 say their work often or always involves busy work, 37% of respondents reported that busy work constitutes 25–50% of their daily workload and another 10% reported that more than half of their daily work is busy work.

After reading the results, I had two questions: first, how is Resume Builder defining "busy work?" Second, how do these results map to other surveys about employee time management? For example, last fall, Workhuman's most recent Global Human Workplace Index survey showed a whopping 37% of managers "faking" high levels of productivity at work and doing activities that looked like work but contributing nothing to the bottom line.

Resume Now hadn't provided a specific and formal explanation of how the vendor defined "busy work" for survey purposes but this phrase in the report jumped out: "tasks that add little value, draining time and energy that could be better used elsewhere." This led to more questions -- little value to whom? And who defines "value" here? For example, I spend a solid 30 minutes a week listening to a New Age playlist while cleaning off my desktop and downloads folder on my laptop; while spending 1.25% of a workweek on digital decluttering might seem like busywork, it's the kind of work that allows me to put files in the proper cloud-based team repository, append screengrabs to research notes on stories, or add items to a follow-up list as needed. However, being able to grab digital assets later, during the contextually appropriate times, thanks to work I did earlier, makes me more efficient -- and therefore more productive -- at my job.

So you can see where it would be helpful to find out how workforce researchers or service vendors are defining busy work versus productive work. In Asana's Anatomy of Work Global Index 2023, the term "busy work" didn't come up, but the work management platform did define something similar and the numbers weren't great:

In the Anatomy of Work Global Index, a major boost to productivity was identified -- and it wasn't AI. Rather, workers complain about having to use too many applications, and the app juggling makes more work around trying to do the "real" work of collaborating, acting on new information, or doing assigned work in a timely fashion:

So: is app switching busy work? Arguably, yes. It's the work you do to get to the work you need to do. Will adding an AI tool help? It depends on whether Ai will streamline existing workloads or if its output will be yet another thing to review and manage before getting on to the skill-based or strategic work you're meant to be doing.

As any worker can tell you, not all work is created equal, and some might be genuinely a waste of people's time, attention and effort. But before we spin up about wasted hours, lost productivity and busy work, it's worth pausing to ask how any solution can be sure to create less work forthe people who are clearly wary of being asked to do more.