In short: Teams are working longer hours than ever, yet strategic progress stalls. Asana's research across 10,000+ knowledge workers found that 60% of working time goes to "work about work" (chasing updates, hunting for documents, sitting in status meetings), leaving roughly a quarter for skilled work and just 13% for strategy. The causes aren't only technical. Columbia Business School research identifies conspicuous busyness as a modern status symbol, and most organisations reward the person who puts out today's fire over the one who quietly prevents next month's. This article covers why organisations get stuck on the treadmill, what it looks like specifically in procurement, and the three shifts that get a team off it.
A frustrating paradox is common in modern organisations: teams work harder and longer than ever, yet despite the technology available, real strategic progress fails to materialise. This pattern of stagnation despite considerable effort is captured well by a metaphor: the manual work treadmill.
Unlike motorised treadmills, manual ones need no electricity. The belt is driven entirely by the user's effort, which means reaching the same speed takes noticeably more energy than on a powered machine. The analogy holds for how many organisations operate: all the energy goes into keeping the belt moving, and none of it moves you anywhere.
This isn't just a metaphor. It's measurable. Asana's Anatomy of Work Index, based on a survey of more than 10,000 knowledge workers globally, found that 60% of working time goes to "work about work": communicating about tasks, attending status meetings, searching for documents and information, chasing approvals, and managing shifting priorities.
The breakdown of the remaining time is what makes this striking. Only about a quarter of the day goes to the skilled work people were actually hired to do, and roughly 13% to strategic planning. Repetitive manual tasks (data re-entry, copying between systems, manual reconciliation) sit largely inside that 60%, which is why automating them frees genuine capacity rather than shaving minutes.
The cumulative figures are stark. Over a year, the average knowledge worker spends 103 hours in unnecessary meetings, 209 hours on duplicative work, and 352 hours talking about work rather than doing it.
The treadmill has a very specific shape in a procurement function. A buyer's day fills with comparing supplier quotes by hand across incompatible spreadsheets, hunting for last year's contract across email and shared drives, chasing approvals that have stalled with someone on holiday, and re-entering the same supplier data into a second system because the first one doesn't talk to it.
None of that is the work a sourcing professional was hired for: category strategy, supplier development, negotiation, risk management. But it reliably consumes the day, and it's precisely the category of work that automation removes rather than accelerates.
Companies stay on this treadmill largely for cultural and psychological reasons, not technical ones.
Research from Columbia Business School identifies "conspicuous busyness" as a defining status symbol of our time. When someone is always busy, works late, and has a full calendar, it signals that they're in demand and possess scarce skills. Visible activity becomes evidence of worth.
The consequence is that the person who looks least busy, often because they automated their way out of the busywork, reads as the least valuable, which is exactly backwards.
Managers and key personnel spend much of their time reacting to unexpected problems, which crowds out planning and value-creating work. Inefficient as it is, this is psychologically rewarding: the hero who resolves a sudden crisis gets visible praise, while the person who automates a process so the crisis never happens gets nothing to point at.
This produces a self-sustaining loop. Firefighting consumes the resources that would otherwise fund prevention, which guarantees more fires, which requires more firefighting. The organisation isn't irrational. It's responding accurately to what it rewards.
When an organisation spends its energy on routine work, its capacity to plan erodes. Maintaining the status quo absorbs everything, so preparing for what's next never gets resourced.
Two things make this worse. First, leaders frequently mistake operational and tactical work for strategic work, believing they're setting direction while actually spending most of their time running day-to-day operations. Second, when employees don't know the organisation's strategy, they can't prioritise against it, so the default becomes whatever is loudest.
Eventually this hits a hard ceiling: manual processes reach a point where they cannot support further growth, and bottlenecks form.
The instinctive response is to speed things up: hire more people, buy more tools. But adding capacity to a broken process mostly means running the same inefficiency faster and at greater cost. Getting off the treadmill isn't about accelerating the existing process; it's about redesigning it.
Automate the low-value, high-frequency work. Identify the tasks that recur constantly and contribute little (approval routing, invoice matching, status notifications) and remove them from human hands entirely.
Change what gets rewarded. If firefighting earns recognition and prevention doesn't, no amount of tooling will change behaviour. Make proactive efficiency improvements visible and credited, including the unglamorous ones that stop problems from occurring.
Make the strategy legible. People can only prioritise against goals they know about. Combine that with honest capacity planning, so the work that gets committed to is work that actually fits.
Organisations get stuck on the manual work treadmill when energy goes to low-value, reactive tasks and no capacity remains for progress. Breaking out starts with identifying and automating the frequent, low-value work, but it doesn't end there. The culture has to stop rewarding heroic firefighting over quiet prevention, and people need to know the strategy well enough to prioritise against it.
Do that, and the organisation works not just harder, but somewhere.
What exactly counts as "work about work"?
Communicating about tasks rather than doing them, attending status meetings, searching for documents and information, chasing approvals, switching between tools, and managing shifting priorities. Asana's research puts this at 60% of the average knowledge worker's time, with about a quarter left for skilled work and 13% for strategy.
Why doesn't hiring more people solve the bottleneck?
Because it accelerates the existing process rather than fixing it. If the underlying workflow requires manual reconciliation across disconnected systems, more people means more manual reconciliation, at higher cost, with more coordination overhead. The constraint is process design, not headcount.
Why do organisations reward firefighting over prevention?
Because firefighting is visible and prevention isn't. A resolved crisis has a clear hero and a clear before-and-after; a crisis that never happened produces nothing to point at. Unless recognition is deliberately restructured, the incentives reliably favour reaction over prevention.
What does the treadmill look like specifically in procurement?
Comparing supplier quotes by hand across incompatible formats, searching for contracts across email and shared drives, chasing stalled approvals, and re-entering supplier data into systems that don't integrate. It crowds out the actual sourcing work: category strategy, supplier development, negotiation, and risk management.
Where should a team start?
With the tasks that are both frequent and low-value, since those give the fastest capacity return. But measure the current split between transactional and strategic work first. Most teams estimate it badly, and without a baseline there's no way to demonstrate the improvement afterwards.
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