Productivity theater is the biggest time suck among workers, study finds—'we’re in a system that, unintentionally, is set up to steal our attention'

For a new report, “The State of Teams,” Atlassian surveyed 5,000 knowledge workers across the U.S., Australia, India, Germany, and France—as well as 100 Fortune 500 executives. Dean and her team wanted to understand the pressing issue, amid stalled productivity: Why are teams wasting time, and where is that time going? 

Every year, Atlassian found, within the Fortune 500, 25 billion work hours are lost to ineffective collaboration, and the culprits in that productivity drain are the same ones behind Americans’ generally declining attention spans—too many screens, updates, and distractions perfectly designed to waste time.

“When I say, ‘why are teams wasting time?’ I’m not saying it’s intentional,” Dean said. “I’m saying we’re in a system that, unintentionally, is set up to steal our attention, drag our efforts to wrong places, and make it harder to get work done. We want to free workers and leaders from that reality.”

Workers and leaders feel the same way. Nearly all (93%) of Fortune 500 executives told the researchers they believe their teams could do their same work in half the time it currently takes them to do it. That comes out to 25 billion hours, across industries, of wasted effort each year, or four hours out of an eight-hour workday. And managers estimate that fewer than 1 in 4 of their teams are doing mission-critical work. 

Indeed, 65% of knowledge worker respondents told Atlassian they feel it’s more important for them to react to notifications than to make progress on actual tasks. A similar share said they feel they’re constantly pulled in different directions. 

Even worse: 50% of workers said they’ve found themselves doing duplicative work—the same tasks as another team somewhere else in the company—which they often don’t realize until it’s too late. “That really speaks to where we place our efforts, as organizations, and how much notifications waste our time,” Dean said.

The buck stops with the boss

As for how to solve these problems—as with many workplace issues—it often comes down to commitments on the team level. “It’s really about driving attention towards what matters most, either from a high-level goal perspective, or even as a team,” she said. “We want teams to have permission to focus on what matters most.”

To managers’ credit, they’re not intending to stymie progress; odds are, most of them would be disappointed to learn that their workers prioritize responding instantly to Slack or Teams pings over actually doing the job. Nonetheless, as with all workflow details, the onus is on the boss to make priorities clear.

“Everyone’s working from different locations, are disrupted by tech, and have incredible numbers of notifications and an impossible amount of meetings,” Dean said. “We need to create more space for people to get thoughtful and strategic about what matters. I think we’re living in a system that doesn’t feel healthy or sustainable right now. It’s obvious that there’s a better way.”

The better way, ideally, is clarity and agreement on what matters. “That’s what so much of this is about,” Dean said.

Then there’s the matter of productivity theater, which appears to be the biggest time suck altogether. “Often, when we react to notifications all day long, and just show up to whatever our calendars say is important, it means we’re stuck driving our attention towards things that may not be the highest value.”

Maybe you should skip that meeting

The best-performing teams, Atlassian found, are those who regularly gut-check on whether they’re working on the right tasks, use their time to make real progress, and make the bulk of their institutional knowledge easy to find and parse.

One of the most important changes managers and leaders can make is to be clear on what matters up and down the pipeline—and then reorienting operations and resources around making progress toward those goals. Or, as Dean put it, don’t let Slack or calendar blocks dictate what’s most important to workers. 

Rather, execs should maintain a “spirit of experimentation.” Luckily, artificial intelligence, in all its forms, is “the cool kid in town,” Dean said, which makes it a handy on-ramp for new tools that could speed business along—leaving the bulk of time for people to do what they do best.