Is Your Team Busy or Productive? Work Management Shows the Difference

Are you really managing work, or are you just checking off tasks? Think about that for a second. As a leader, it is easy to believe that everything is running smoothly if the teams are completing tasks. But is it? What if I told you that checking off tasks doesn’t actually mean you are managing work?

Let’s look at some data: A Gartner study found that only 41% of employees are performing optimally. over 30% of workers’ time is spent in meetings they don’t need to attend. Harvard Business Review found that executives spend 23 hours a week in soul-sucking meetings and 90% daydream during these meetings.

So even if we are hitting the project milestones, a significant chunk of the team's time and energy is slipping through the cracks. And no, task or project management tools won’t show us that.

We are all accustomed to thinking that project management is the gold standard for getting things done. We have timelines, deliverables, and Gantt charts, and they are all vital, yes, but also very limited. Because people don’t just work on projects. They work on a mix of operational tasks, attend meetings that may or may not matter, put out fires, and take on random tasks that pop up, and feedback loops—things that don’t fit neatly into a “project” box. Or a project management model. 

So, the question bears repeating: Are we really managing work, or just checking off tasks?

If we are only managing tasks, we are missing out on huge areas of inefficiency, burnout risks, and ultimately, lost profitability. 

Work Management: Is it just another buzzword?

No, we are not just rebranding project or task management with a new name. Project management is highly structured and focused on delivering a defined output. It is all about milestones and deadlines. Task management zooms in on individual to-dos: “Who is doing what, by when?”

Work management is fundamentally different. It is an approach to managing everything that gets done in an organization. Not just projects. Not just tasks. Everything.

Let’s look at an example: your typical task management tool, allows you to assign tasks to your team. Great. You can create a task that says, “I need to manage John Smith.” You can even track his productivity and set reminders to check in on him. But here’s where things fall apart: how do you actually manage John Smith’s work? How do you know what he’s working on every day, every week, across multiple responsibilities? How do you track all the non-project-related work he’s doing? You don’t.

Let’s break it down:

As a manager, you need to know two things about your people:

1. Is their time being fully utilized?

2. Are they productive?

   
   

Look at John’s schedule: 20 meetings a week, of which maybe 5 are truly necessary. The rest? Deadweight. A project management tool won’t tell you that. A task management tool can’t capture the hours he’s burning. You need a broader lens— work management.

You can track John’s utilization, and not just whether his tasks are done. You can see that he’s not just logging 40 hours a week, but whether those 40 hours are being spent productively. Is he at 100%? Is he working 50 hours and burning out, without getting credit for that extra effort?  Unsurprisingly, 84% of leaders have recognized burnout in their team for which insufficient recognition is a significant contributor. 

Manage Work Holistically to Drive Productivity and Profitability

And here’s the kicker: businesses aren’t in the game to manage tasks or projects—they’re in the game to drive profitability. And profitability isn’t just about getting tasks done. It’s about optimizing your team’s time, and ensuring that every hour worked is an hour well spent. If you’re relying on project or task management alone, you are missing a huge part of the equation.

Your team isn’t just a collection of people working on a series of projects. They are navigating an entire ecosystem of responsibilities, initiatives, and deliverables. Work management understands that. And that’s the distinction. Work management isn’t just a system. It’s a way of thinking. It’s the realization that true productivity comes from understanding and managing the totality of work.  And if you are not managing work holistically, you are leaving value on the table.