Busy Work Is Inevitable. Don’t Let It Drag You Down.
Most software jobs have a steady layer of work that keeps things running but doesn’t feel like “building.”Tickets that should have been prevented. Follow-ups that only exist because context was missing. The same clarification you’ve typed three times this month. Cleanup after a deploy. Chasing an answer that lives in someone’s head.
If this sounds familiar, it’s not just you. A U.S. Chamber of Commerce summary of a worker survey found that nearly a third of employees spend at least 11 hours per week on busy work, about 28% of their workweek.
The reason you should care is that busy work can quietly change your priorities, work-life balance, and even your career trajectory.When repetitive, low-leverage work expands, it crowds out the work that builds skills, trust, and autonomy. That pattern shows up in engagement, too. Gallup reported 31% of U.S. employees were engaged in 2024, a 10-year low.
So the question isn’t “how do I avoid busy work?” Most of us can’t just stop doing this kind of work.
The better question is: how do I stop paying full price for the same work over and over?
A Useful Definition for “Busy Work”
“Busy work” and “operational work” often look similar on the surface. Both can be unglamorous. Both can be necessary.The difference is what the work changes.
Busy Work
- Resolves today’s instance
- Leaves the system behaving the same way tomorrow
- Comes back at full cost (same confusion, same follow-ups, same cleanup)
Operational or System Work
- Resolves today’s instance and reduces tomorrow’s cost
- Clarifies expectations, improves handoffs, or removes a recurring source of friction
- Shows up less often, or takes less effort the next time
This matters because it’s the difference between staying useful and becoming trusted.
If you want a related framing from past issues, this ties closely to:
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A Quick Self-Check From Last Week
Look at what took up your time last week. Not the ticket titles. The actual effort.Now ask one question:
Did this work make next week easier?
If you want a concrete way to spot “reset work,” look for patterns like:
- The same question keeps coming back from different people
- Work bounces between dev/QA/product because expectations were implied, not explicit
- The same class of bug reappears with slightly different symptoms
- You’re always rebuilding context before you can make progress
- You keep hunting for information that should be findable
Those patterns are great signals. They tell you where the system isn’t absorbing learning.
This is common in knowledge work broadly. Asana’s research has reported that knowledge workers spend around 60% of their time on “work about work” such as chasing updates, switching tools, and attending unnecessary meetings.
That’s a lot of time spent keeping work moving rather than changing how it moves.
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Where can AI save you time?
My friends at Big Creek Growth put together a quick survey to spot the repetitive work you can hand off to automation.
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How To Limit the Impact of Busy Work Without Trying to Eliminate It
When busy work is unavoidable, the main lever you still have is simple: treat repetition as data.Not in a big process sense. In a small, practical sense.Here are three ways to apply learning without turning everything into a project.
1) Capture the answer once
If you’ve explained something twice, you’ve earned the right to write it down.Examples:
- A short internal doc for a recurring question
- A “how we do X here” snippet you can link instead of rewriting
- A checklist for a recurring operational task
This is boring work that creates real leverage. It’s also where many teams waste time. Atlassian’s research found teams waste 25% of their time searching for answers.
2) Clarify the handoff, not just the task
A surprising amount of repeat work is really a handoff failure.If work keeps bouncing back, the fix is often:
- clearer acceptance criteria
- clearer “what good looks like.”
- a more explicit “here’s what I checked, here’s what I didn’t.”
3) Change the default, not the exception
If something repeats, your first instinct is usually to work around it. The higher-leverage move is to adjust the default so the same problem is less likely to exist next time.Examples:
- a template that prompts for missing context up front
- a “definition of ready” for tickets that prevents churn
- a lightweight guardrail (linting, alerting, automated checks) that catches repeat issues earlier
This is also where “leading with data” becomes a superpower. You don’t need perfect metrics. You just need enough signal to say, “This keeps happening.”
Show How the System Improved
Operational work often stays hidden because it prevents problems instead of producing something you can point at.
That’s good for the team, but it can be hard for others to recognize. If your manager can’t explain what improved because of your work, they can’t advocate for you.
So, to show off the work you did, be specific about the system change and the result, and focus on answering these three questions:
- What kept repeating
- What you changed in the system
- What got easier afterward
Examples that work in a weekly update or a 1:1:
“Onboarding questions kept landing in DMs, so I wrote a short doc and linked it in the channel. Questions dropped off.”
“Stories kept bouncing between dev and QA, so we tightened acceptance criteria and added a quick checklist. Rework went down.”
“We lost time during incidents hunting for ownership, so we clarified owners and escalation paths. Triage got faster.”
Two rules keep this grounded:
- Use plain language. Cause and effect are enough.
- Use light evidence when you have it (“this came up 6 times last sprint” beats “this was a big win”).
Presenting improvements in this way helps operational work become visible. It also allows you to grow into leadership opportunities by enabling you to communicate the value and impact of the work you do.
Busy work will always exist in software.
The difference over time is whether your work keeps the system up and running or improves it so it asks less of you next time.
If you want one habit that’s worth keeping, it’s this:
After you finish a recurring piece of work, ask yourself, “Did the system behave differently because I did this?”