When I walk into a company for the first time, the thing I hear most often is always the same: “We’re swamped, we can’t keep up with everything”. Then I look at the detail of the activities, and something interesting happens.
I find that the team really is working all day. But that work isn’t producing the results it should.
The problem isn’t the amount of work. It’s the kind of work.
I walk into an SME of 40 people. Everyone is extremely busy. Constant meetings, emails arriving non-stop, a to-do list that keeps growing. The owner tells me: “I can’t understand why margins are falling with everything we do”.
I start tracking where the time goes. And I immediately see the same pattern.
Two days of meetings to coordinate an activity that would have needed 20 minutes, structured the right way. A person who spends hours every week extracting data from a system to paste into an Excel sheet nobody looks at. A manager who writes monthly reports nobody reads. A team that stalls waiting for approvals on decisions that wouldn’t be needed.
All of this has a name: low-value activities. They look like work, because they consume time and effort. But they don’t move the needle on what really matters.
When I look at the overall picture, the trend is always the same: most of the hours go into activities that generate a small part of the real value. And the remaining hours generate almost all of the result.
So: how do you recognise it in your team?
You start asking a simple question for every recurring activity: “If we didn’t do this for a month, who would notice and why?”. If the answer is “Nobody, or almost nobody”, you’ve found waste.
Meetings are the first candidate. A morning meeting that lasts an hour when 10 minutes would do. A planning meeting nobody remembers the purpose of. A review meeting that has turned into a venting session with no concrete actions. They are all activities that eat time without moving the result.
The second candidate is reporting. Monthly reports nobody reads, metrics nobody uses, elaborate tables nobody consults. It’s work that creates the illusion of control, but control of what?
The third is bureaucratic coordination: pointless authorisations, escalations that could have been decided independently, approval rounds that slow down the flow of work without protecting anything important.
This is where we step in.
Less models, more visibility. I start by mapping where the time goes, which activities generate value and which don’t. Then together we identify 2-3 concrete actions: stop a meeting, automate a report, delegate a decision instead of centralising it.
It’s not a revolution. They are micro-interventions. But what happens is predictable: the team finds time every week to spend on what really matters. And the owner sees the margin start to breathe again.
In your team, which recurring activity would nobody notice if it disappeared tomorrow?