A day packed with meetings, messages and activity can feel highly productive. But if important work is still moving slowly, the business is observing activity rather than seeing performance.
Performance is not a count of active hours. It is the ability to convert time, capability and tools into quality output. The right question is therefore not “are employees busy?” but “where is time getting blocked, and why isn't it turning into results?”.
ActivTrak analysed more than 443 million working hours across 1,111 companies and 163,638 employees between 2023 and 2025. By their measure, focus efficiency fell to 60%, the average focus session dropped to 13 minutes and 7 seconds, while collaboration rose 34% and multitasking rose 12%. This does not mean every employee can only concentrate for 13 minutes. What the series shows is that results can still improve even as the way people work becomes denser and more fragmented. Companies need to look at both output and the quality of the working rhythm.
Root causes worth checking
Cause 1: The workday is broken into too many pieces
Employees have to switch constantly between tasks, chat, email and meetings. Every activity looks necessary, but together they leave no block long enough for difficult work.
Signals: short focus sessions; frequent application switching; important work finished late in the day; collaboration rising while cycle time stays flat.
What to do: protect focus blocks; batch non-urgent discussions; move status updates to async channels; set response-time conventions based on urgency.
The link to the data: ActivTrak's 13-minute-7-second focus session figure does not prove causation on its own, but it is a signal worth checking to see whether collaboration and multitasking are crowding out deep work.
Cause 2: Priorities are never translated into work limits
The company says it has priorities, yet keeps adding new requests without stopping old ones. Employees open many threads of work and everything slows down at once.
Signals: high work-in-progress and low completion rates; shifting deadlines; many urgent tasks; managers and employees describing the single most important task differently.
What to do: cap work in progress; require every new request to name what gets pushed back; have team leads lock three priorities per week; make it clear who is authorised to change priorities.
Cause 3: Work is stuck in the process, not with the people doing it
Employees can finish their own part but then wait on documents, approvals or handovers. Elapsed time stretches out even though actual processing time is small.
Signals: tasks open for a long time with little processing time; many handoffs between people; work returning to earlier steps; one individual approver becoming a queue.
What to do: separate processing time from waiting time; set SLAs for approval steps; delegate authority within thresholds; standardise handover conditions; remove steps that add no value.
Cause 4: The metrics are rewarding busyness
If the business praises hours logged, activity volume or late-night replies, employees will optimise for visible presence instead of results.
Signals: high activity without any gain in quality; employees stretching work out; small tasks prioritised because they are easy to record; strategic work postponed.
What to do: build output, quality and timeliness into the formula; use activity data to explain context rather than as the headline score; publish the formula and give people the right to contest it.
How to identify the real cause in your business
Step 1: compare time against output, role by role. Step 2: separate processing time from waiting time. Step 3: check how many tasks are being worked on in parallel. Step 4: run short employee interviews to validate the data. Step 5: pick the one cause with the strongest evidence and run an experiment.
Avoid applying a single remedy to every case. If meetings are the cause, protecting focus blocks helps. If an approval step is the cause, muting notifications solves nothing. If the KPI is wrong, process improvements still won't change behaviour.
A 30-day plan
Week 1: establish a baseline covering output, quality, focus sessions, work in progress and waiting time. Week 2: select the primary cause. Week 3: apply one intervention. Week 4: compare before and after, and gather feedback.
How does DearPulse help?
DearPulse can help you combine work-rhythm data with task and progress data. Employees can see where their own time is being fragmented or left waiting; managers can see the cause at team level. Crucially, DearPulse does not declare “who is underperforming” from time data alone, it helps pinpoint what needs to change and then measure whether the change worked.
CTA: Assess your current state over 30 days before changing KPIs, processes or headcount.
