Some of the biggest delays in business happen when nobody is actually working on the task.
Forty Minutes of Work, Three Days to Deliver
Imagine a quote request arriving on Monday morning.
The estimator is in meetings until noon, then pulled into an urgent order. She opens the request on Tuesday afternoon and finds that two details are missing and one price needs the owner’s approval. She emails the customer and the owner. The customer replies Wednesday morning. The owner approves the price Wednesday evening. The quote goes out on Thursday.
The actual work (reviewing the request, building the quote, checking the price) might take about forty minutes. Delivering it takes three days. Nobody in this example is slow or careless. Everyone is busy with something else that also matters.
There’s a useful distinction in operations management between the time spent actively working on something and the total time it takes to complete it. The difference is waiting time. And when a business starts looking at that gap, it often discovers that improving the work itself is only part of the opportunity. Seen this way, the quote request was not a forty-minute task that took too long. It was forty minutes of work surrounded by three days of waiting: for availability, for missing information, for a decision, for the next person in line. One common reason work waits is that the information needed to move it forward sits with someone else.
In Atlassian’s State of Teams 2025 research, based on a survey of 12,000 knowledge workers in six countries and 200 Fortune 1000 executives, employees identified difficulty finding information as the number one barrier to moving fast. More than half (56%) said they often find that the only way to get the information they need is to ask someone or schedule a meeting. Executives and teams also reported spending about a quarter of their workweek searching for information.
The research focuses on large organizations, but the dynamic is familiar in businesses of any size. When information is difficult to access without involving another person, progress depends on that person’s availability. That changes the question. If much of the delay happens while work is waiting, asking people to work faster addresses only part of the timeline. The larger opportunity lies in understanding why the work waits.
Customers Experience the Wait, Not the Effort
From inside the business, a three-day quote feels reasonable. Everyone knows how full the week was.
From outside, the customer sees only one thing: how long they waited.
They don’t see the urgent order that interrupted the estimator, the missing information, or the approval sitting in someone else’s inbox.
They see a request submitted on Monday and a response received on Thursday.
And while the business is working through its internal priorities, the customer is making decisions of their own.
The quality of the eventual quote still matters. But so does the experience of getting there.
A Different Way to Think About Capacity
Most businesses measure capacity in people and hours. When the workload grows, the options seem obvious: work longer, hire more, or accept that things will take longer. But capacity is also about how much work can move forward without waiting for a specific person. Look closely at what fills a typical queue, and two very different kinds of work appear side by side. There is work that genuinely requires experience and judgment: pricing an unusual job, handling a difficult customer, deciding how to resolve an exception. And there is work that simply needs to move: acknowledging a request, gathering missing information, updating a record, sending a status update, reminding someone of a commitment, routing a question to the right person.
In many growing businesses, both kinds of work wait in the same line, in front of the same people. The second kind may be straightforward, but it competes for the same attention and the same calendar as the first. That has consequences beyond the minutes each routine task takes. When the people at the center of a process are already close to full capacity, even a small increase in demand can lead to disproportionately longer waits. A routine task added to an already full queue doesn’t just take a few minutes to complete. It can also delay everything behind it, including the work that genuinely needs someone’s expertise. The quote didn’t take three days because building it was hard. It took three days because it was waiting in line with everything else.
What Changes When Work Doesn’t Wait
Now imagine the same quote request in a business where more of the routine work can move forward without waiting for the estimator to become available. The customer receives an acknowledgment right away. The missing details are identified and requested on Monday, not Tuesday afternoon. The account history, prior quotes, and relevant notes are gathered before the estimator opens the file. If the request falls under an existing pricing rule that requires approval, it is flagged to the owner early, with the relevant context attached. The estimator may still be busy on Monday. The owner still needs to approve the price. Some waiting remains, because some decisions genuinely require the right person. But much of the preparation that used to start only when someone became available has already happened. When the estimator sits down, the request is ready for her judgment instead of waiting for her to reconstruct it. Missing information has been collected earlier. Routine steps have already moved forward. The quote can be completed sooner without asking the estimator to work any faster.
The same logic applies across the business. An order status question doesn’t have to wait for someone to search through emails and piece together what happened last week. A commitment made in a meeting can be tracked until it’s fulfilled, rather than relying on someone to remember it. A new client’s onboarding can begin moving when the contract is signed, instead of waiting until someone finds a free afternoon. None of this removes people from the work that matters. Decisions still belong to the people with the experience to make them. What changes is that work arrives better prepared for those decisions and spends less time waiting behind everything else. For the customer, that can mean a faster response. For the team, fewer interruptions and less time spent preparing work that could already have been ready. For the business, it creates room to handle more without every new request adding to the same backlog.
A More Useful Question
For years, conversations about productivity have focused on people: how much they can do, how fast they can work, how many hours they can sustain.
The waiting perspective offers a more useful question: How much of our work is waiting for a person, and how much of that waiting is actually necessary? The next time a customer request takes three days to complete, look at where those three days went. How much time was spent doing the work? And how much was spent waiting for someone to get to it? The answers may reveal opportunities that another productivity report never would. Because sometimes the biggest opportunity isn’t to make the work faster. It’s to stop making the work wait.
Reference
- Atlassian. (2025). The State of Teams 2025. Atlassian Teamwork Lab. Survey of 12,000 knowledge workers across six countries and 200 Fortune 1000 executives. atlassian.com/blog/state-of-teams-2025 · Full report (PDF)