How much time do teams spend on status updates? What the research says
Knowledge workers spend roughly 53% to 61% of their working time on coordination rather than the work itself, according to every major study we checked: Asana's Anatomy of Work series (58% in 2023, 55% "busywork" in 2025), Microsoft 365 usage data (60% of time in email, chats and meetings in 2024), and McKinsey's analysis of IDC data (61%). No large study isolates status updates on their own, but they sit squarely inside that coordination time, alongside searching for information, chasing approvals and unnecessary meetings. Below are the numbers, what each one actually measures, and what that means for a small team.
How much time do workers spend on work about work?
| Study | Year and sample | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| Asana Anatomy of Work Index | 2019; 10,223 knowledge workers | 60% of time on work about work, 27% on skilled work, 13% on strategy |
| Asana Anatomy of Work Global Index | 2023; 9,615 knowledge workers in 6 countries | 58% of the day on work about work; workers estimate better processes would save 4.9 hours a week |
| Asana State of AI at Work | 2025; 9,236 knowledge workers | 55% of time on busywork (new label and panel, not directly comparable) |
| Microsoft Work Trend Index | 2024; Microsoft 365 usage data | 60% of time in email, chats and meetings; 40% in creation apps |
| McKinsey Global Institute (IDC data) | 2012 | 61% of the week outside role-specific work: 28% email, 19% searching, 14% internal communication |
| Atlassian State of Teams | 2025 | About 25% of the workweek spent searching for information |
Sources: Asana 2019, Asana 2023, the AI at Work Fact Book's summary of Asana 2025, Microsoft 2024 and McKinsey 2012, and Atlassian State of Teams 2025. Checked October 28, 2026. Several of these come from vendors that sell work-management software, and most are self-reported.
Is there a statistic for time spent on status updates alone?
Not a reliable one. You will see precise-sounding numbers for "hours per week on status reports" in blog posts, but we could not trace them to a published study with a method. The big surveys bundle status work into broader categories. Asana's definition of work about work explicitly includes chasing status, searching for information, switching apps and shifting priorities. McKinsey's split counts email and internal communication. Microsoft measures time in communication apps.
So the honest answer is: status updates are one slice of the half of the workday that goes to coordination, and how big that slice is depends on your team. The useful move is to measure your own, which takes about ten minutes (see below).
What do interruptions and messages add up to?
Microsoft's 2025 telemetry, summarized in Breaking down the infinite workday, gives a sense of the noise status work lives in:
- Heavily pinged employees are interrupted roughly every 2 minutes during core hours by a meeting, email or chat (based on the top 20% of users by pings received).
- The average worker receives 117 emails and 153 Teams messages a weekday.
- 57% of meetings are ad hoc calls without a calendar invite.
- 48% of employees and 52% of leaders say their work feels chaotic and fragmented.
Asana's 2023 index adds that knowledge workers lose 2.8 hours a week to unnecessary meetings (3.6 hours for senior leaders) and use 8.8 apps on average. Many "quick sync" meetings are status updates that could have been a written note.
What does this mean for a small team?
Small teams feel coordination differently. There are fewer layers to report up through, but the same few people write the client updates, the investor note, the Monday priorities and the Friday recap. Here is a simple way to size it, using your own numbers rather than survey averages:
- List every recurring update your team writes: weekly status, client reports, standups, EOD notes, investor updates.
- For each, write down how many people touch it and roughly how many minutes each spends gathering and writing.
- Multiply by how often it happens per month.
As an illustration only (not a benchmark): if five people each spend 45 minutes a week on status updates, that is about 16 hours a month, two full working days. Our reporting time calculator does this math for client reporting.
How can teams cut the time spent on status updates?
- Replace status meetings with one written update. A consistent format like a daily EOD report or a client status update template is faster to read than a meeting is to attend.
- Pull from systems, not memory. Most of a status update already exists in Linear, GitHub, Google Sheets and Gmail. Gathering it is the slow part.
- Automate the gathering, keep the judgment. Let tooling collect the facts and draft, and have a person decide what matters and what to say about it.
Geniusly is an AI coworker for your team in Slack. It reads the accounts you connect (Gmail, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Slack, GitHub, Linear, and Google Ads) and prepares a brief, report, status update, or handoff for a person to review. Connected apps are read-only by default, except Google Sheets edits you explicitly ask for, and Slack messages beyond its reply are posted only after your approval. Anyone in a channel it has been invited to can ask it for work, it can run a task once, daily, or weekly, and it has a Free plan.
For example, it can draft the weekly status report in Slack or a weekly KPI post from Google Sheets on a schedule, so the person's time goes to checking and adding context. Get started with Geniusly free.
Frequently asked questions
How much time do employees spend on work about work?
Most studies land between 53% and 61% of working time. Asana's 2023 index found 58%, its 2025 report found 55% under a new 'busywork' label, Microsoft's 2024 usage data found 60% of time in email, chats and meetings, and McKinsey's 2012 analysis found 61%.
How much time do people spend on status updates each week?
No large published study isolates status updates. They are part of the broader work-about-work category, so the best estimate for your team is to list your recurring updates and time them for a week.
How much time do workers spend searching for information?
Atlassian's State of Teams 2025 report puts it at about 25% of the workweek. McKinsey's 2012 analysis of IDC data found 19%.
How many hours are lost to unnecessary meetings?
Asana's 2023 Anatomy of Work Global Index found knowledge workers lose 2.8 hours a week to unnecessary meetings, and senior leaders lose 3.6 hours.
Can AI reduce time spent on status reports?
It can cut the gathering and drafting time when the facts already live in connected tools like Linear, GitHub, Google Sheets or Gmail. A person should still review the draft and add the context the tools do not capture.