The pandemic has forever altered many aspects of work, but there’s one thing it hasn’t changed — how much time we spend just shuffling paper around.
White-collar workers devote more than half their day to “work coordination,” which includes following up on things, searching for information and communicating about work, according to a survey by business software maker Asana. While there are regional differences — Germans devote a bit less of their day to such mundane tasks than Americans — the results are broadly similar across the globe: Only about a third of the workday is spent doing what we were actually hired to do, and that hasn’t changed much since 2019.
