The sixty percent problem
Here is a number that should alarm you: knowledge workers spend fifty-eight percent of their workday on what Asana's Anatomy of Work Global Index calls "work about work" — coordination, status updates, searching for information, chasing approvals, and managing the logistics of collaboration rather than doing the actual skilled work they were hired to perform (Asana, 2023). Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index found the same pattern from a different angle: sixty percent of a typical knowledge worker's time goes to email, chat, and meetings, leaving only forty percent for creative or strategic tasks (Microsoft, 2025).
Fifty-eight percent. Sixty percent. Call it whatever you want. The majority of your workday is already shallow.
Most productivity advice responds to this fact with outrage. Eliminate the shallow work. Refuse the meetings. Batch your email to twice a day and guard your calendar like a fortress. And that advice is partially right — you should protect your deep work hours. The previous lesson, Deep work requires attention scaffolding (L-0076), established that sustained focus needs environmental support and structural protection.
But there is a subtler move that most people miss. The problem is not that shallow work exists. The problem is that shallow work is randomly distributed across your day, consuming peak attention hours that should be reserved for cognitively demanding tasks. The solution is not elimination. It is placement. Shallow work is not the enemy of deep work — it is the complement, and when you position it correctly, it fills the gaps that deep work cannot occupy.
What shallow work actually is
Cal Newport introduced the term in his 2016 book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. His definition is precise: shallow work consists of "non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate" (Newport, 2016).
The key phrase is "non-cognitively demanding." Shallow work does not require the sustained, directed attention that characterizes deep work. It does not require you to hold complex mental models in working memory, synthesize competing ideas, or produce novel output. It requires executive function — enough to follow a process, respond to a known pattern, or apply a familiar rule — but not the full weight of your prefrontal cortex operating at capacity.
Examples of shallow work in a typical knowledge worker's day:
- Responding to routine email that requires no strategic thought
- Filing expenses, invoices, or administrative paperwork
- Updating project management tools with status changes
- Scheduling meetings and managing calendar logistics
- Processing Slack messages that need acknowledgment but not analysis
- Routine code reviews of small, well-scoped changes
- Data entry and form completion
- Forwarding information to the right people
None of these tasks are unimportant. Several of them are urgent. All of them need to get done. The error is not doing them — it is doing them at the wrong time, using cognitive resources they do not require.
Energy management vs. time management: the Loehr-Schwartz framework
The insight that shallow work should fill attention gaps rather than compete with deep work rests on a paradigm shift from time management to energy management. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz articulated this shift in The Power of Full Engagement (2003), arguing that "energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance."
Their core observation, drawn from decades of working with elite athletes and executives at the Human Performance Institute, is that time is a fixed quantity — you cannot manufacture more of it — but energy is a renewable resource that oscillates in predictable cycles. The critical mistake most people make is treating energy as linear: they assume they should be equally productive at 2 PM as at 9 AM, and when they are not, they blame discipline rather than biology.
Loehr and Schwartz identified four dimensions of energy — physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual — each of which follows its own cycle of expenditure and renewal. For our purposes, the mental dimension is the one that matters most. Mental energy for cognitively demanding work peaks and troughs in roughly ninety-minute cycles (consistent with the basic rest-activity cycle first described by sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman), and the overall daily budget of high-quality mental energy is finite, typically concentrated in a window of three to four hours (Loehr & Schwartz, 2003).
This framework transforms how you think about shallow work. In a time management paradigm, shallow work is waste — time that could have been "used better." In an energy management paradigm, shallow work is a strategic deployment of low-demand tasks during periods when high-demand work would produce poor output anyway. You are not wasting time on email at 3 PM. You are spending depleted energy on tasks calibrated to what that energy can actually accomplish.
The circadian case for task-energy matching
The Loehr-Schwartz framework is not just motivational theory. It is grounded in circadian biology.
Your cognitive performance fluctuates across the day in patterns driven by your internal circadian clock, your chronotype (whether you are a morning or evening person), and the homeostatic accumulation of sleep pressure. A 2023 systematic review published in Chronobiology International found consistent evidence that chronotype moderates the time-of-day effect on cognitive performance: morning types show peak executive function and sustained attention in the morning hours, while evening types peak later in the day (Gupta et al., 2023). A 2024 study in Scientific Reports analyzing a nationally representative sample of older adults found that circadian alignment — matching activity patterns to your biological clock — was significantly associated with better cognitive functioning (Nature, 2024).
The practical implication is straightforward. Your circadian biology creates a natural architecture of high-attention windows and low-attention windows across every day. Deep work belongs in the high window. Shallow work belongs in the low window. This is not a preference or a life hack. It is aligning task demands with biological resource availability.
Most people do the opposite. They arrive at work, open email, spend their peak cognitive hours on shallow processing, and then try to do their most demanding creative or analytical work in the afternoon when their prefrontal cortex is running on fumes. The result is slow, error-prone deep work and an illusion of morning productivity that is actually the most expensive kind of waste: spending premium cognitive resources on discount tasks.
The Pareto lens: not all work creates equal value
The energy management argument becomes even more compelling when you apply the Pareto principle. In most knowledge work, roughly twenty percent of your tasks generate eighty percent of your meaningful output. The architectural decision, the strategic document, the product insight, the code that solves the core problem — these are the vital few. The expense reports, the status updates, the scheduling emails — these are the trivial many (Juran, 1954).
This does not mean the trivial many are optional. Expenses must be filed. Meetings must be scheduled. Status must be communicated. But the Pareto lens clarifies the stakes of misallocation. When you spend your peak attention window on the trivial many, you are not just wasting time — you are consuming the cognitive resource needed for the vital few. The twenty percent of work that creates eighty percent of your value is also the twenty percent that demands your highest-quality attention. Give it the afternoon dregs, and it produces mediocre output. Give it the morning peak, and it produces your best work.
Shallow work, by definition, does not require peak performance. It requires adequate performance. And adequate performance is exactly what your depleted afternoon attention can deliver. This is the fundamental match: deep work needs your best; shallow work needs your adequate. The error is giving your best to tasks that only need adequate, and then trying to deliver adequate on tasks that needed your best.
The shallow work containment strategy
Understanding why shallow work should fill attention gaps is one thing. Implementing it requires a specific structural approach. Here is the protocol, grounded in the research above:
1. Maintain a running shallow work queue. Do not process shallow tasks as they arrive. Capture them — in a list, a folder, a tag in your task manager — and return to your deep work. Every time you interrupt deep work to fire off a quick email, you pay a context-switching tax. Gloria Mark's research found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to return to the same depth of focus after an interruption, and that people actually interrupt themselves more often than external sources interrupt them (Mark, 2023). A shallow work queue converts interruptions into batched future work.
2. Schedule a daily shallow work block. Place a sixty-to-ninety-minute block on your calendar in the post-peak period — typically early-to-mid afternoon for morning chronotypes, or mid-morning for evening chronotypes. This block is dedicated exclusively to processing the shallow queue. Email, Slack, approvals, scheduling, filing, updates — everything that accumulated during your deep work hours gets handled here, in sequence, without guilt.
3. Batch by type, not by arrival time. Within your shallow work block, group similar tasks. Process all email in one pass. Handle all approvals in one pass. Update all project boards in one pass. Batching reduces the cognitive overhead of switching between task types. Research on task batching shows that grouping similar activities minimizes the attention residue that builds up when you alternate between dissimilar tasks (Leroy, 2009).
4. Set a shallow work budget. Newport recommends that knowledge workers aim to spend no more than thirty to fifty percent of their workday on shallow work, and suggests that if the percentage creeps above fifty percent, it is a signal that your role has a structural problem — you are being paid for deep work but scheduled for shallow work (Newport, 2016). Track your ratio for a week using the exercise in this lesson. If shallow work exceeds fifty percent, the problem is not your discipline. It is your calendar.
5. Use the two-minute rule as a pressure valve. David Allen's Getting Things Done principle applies here: if a shallow task takes less than two minutes, do it immediately rather than queuing it. The overhead of capturing, storing, and retrieving a two-minute task exceeds the cost of the interruption. But be honest about the two-minute threshold — most tasks people label "quick" actually take five to fifteen minutes and should be queued (Allen, 2001).
6. Protect the boundary. The most common failure mode is letting shallow work leak back into the deep work window. A "quick" Slack reply at 9:30 AM becomes a twenty-minute thread that fragments your morning focus block. The containment structure only works if the boundary is enforced. When a shallow task appears during deep work hours, the only acceptable response is to add it to the queue. Not "just this one." Not "it'll only take a second." To the queue.
The administrative load is real — and growing
It is worth pausing on the scale of the problem. Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index found that employees are interrupted every two minutes during core work hours — 275 times per day — by meetings, emails, or chats. On average, a knowledge worker handles 117 emails and 153 Teams messages per workday (Microsoft, 2025). The collaboration load has increased by fifty percent over the past two decades, with some employees now spending eighty to eighty-five percent of their time on collaborative activities.
This is not a personal failing. It is a systemic condition of modern knowledge work. The volume of shallow work is not something you caused, and it is not something you can eliminate through sheer willpower. But it is something you can contain through structural decisions about when and how it gets processed.
The Asana data shows that knowledge workers estimate they could save 4.9 hours per week with improved processes (Asana, 2023). That is almost exactly one deep work day — one full day of peak cognitive output — currently being lost to poorly structured shallow work. Not to shallow work itself, but to shallow work done at the wrong time, in the wrong order, with the wrong level of attention.
Extending the model with AI: the shallow work offloading layer
If shallow work should fill attention gaps, the next strategic question is: can you shrink the shallow work itself?
This is where AI tools become a force multiplier for the containment strategy. The defining characteristic of shallow work — non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style, easy to replicate — is also the defining characteristic of tasks that AI handles well. The overlap is nearly perfect.
Email triage and drafting. AI can scan incoming email, flag items that require your judgment, draft responses to routine messages, and pre-sort your inbox by urgency and topic. Research suggests email consumes over four hours of the average professional's day. Even a fifty-percent reduction through AI-assisted triage reclaims two hours — not for more deep work, necessarily, but for compressing your shallow work block so it takes thirty minutes instead of ninety.
Meeting summaries and action items. AI meeting assistants like Otter.ai, Copilot, and similar tools can transcribe meetings in real time, extract action items, and generate summaries. This eliminates one of the most insidious forms of shallow work: the post-meeting processing where you reconstruct what was decided and what you need to do next.
Scheduling and calendar management. AI scheduling tools can coordinate across time zones, protect focus time blocks, and reschedule when conflicts arise — all tasks that require executive function but not deep cognition. Smart calendar systems in 2026 can read context, predict availability, and automate booking without human intervention.
Administrative processing. Form filling, data entry, expense categorization, status updates, and routine document generation — these are pattern-matching tasks where AI performance is already adequate to good. Every administrative task that AI handles is one fewer item in your shallow work queue.
The critical principle from the previous lessons applies here: use AI for context and logistics, not for the cognitive moves that constitute your deep work. Offload the shallow. Protect the deep. The goal is not to eliminate all work — it is to ensure that when you are working, the demands of the task match the quality of attention you have available.
The deeper principle: everything in its right place
The lesson beneath the lesson is this: shallow work is not a problem to solve. It is a resource to deploy.
Every day contains hours when deep focus is available and hours when it is not. The hours when it is not available are not waste — they are capacity for a different kind of work. When you treat shallow work as something to be ashamed of, you either procrastinate on it (creating administrative debt that eventually explodes) or you try to power through deep work during depleted hours (producing mediocre output that needs to be redone).
The epistemically mature move is matching. Match the task to the resource. Match the demand to the supply. Deep work in the peak window. Shallow work in the trough. Nothing wasted, nothing misallocated.
This is, in essence, a resource allocation problem. And like all resource allocation problems, the solution is not to maximize one variable at the expense of all others. It is to optimize across the full set of constraints. You have a finite daily budget of high-quality attention. You have a set of tasks that require high-quality attention and a set that do not. The optimal allocation puts each task in the window that matches its demand.
From containment to vigilance
Once you have a working shallow work containment system — a queue, a scheduled block, a boundary between deep and shallow hours — the next challenge is maintaining it. Because shallow work has a tendency to grow. It creeps. It colonizes. A new Slack channel here. An additional weekly meeting there. One more approval workflow. One more status report.
This incremental expansion is how attention debt accumulates — silently, task by task, until one day you realize that your shallow work block has grown from sixty minutes to three hours, your deep work window has been carved down to a sliver, and you cannot remember the last time you produced something that required your full cognitive capacity.
That is the subject of the next lesson: Attention debt accumulates silently (L-0078). Shallow work containment is the structural defense. Attention debt awareness is the monitoring system that tells you when the structure is failing.
Build the queue. Schedule the block. Protect the boundary. Then watch for drift.
Sources
- Allen, D. (2001). Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Penguin.
- Asana. (2023). Anatomy of Work Global Index 2023.
- Gupta, C. C., et al. (2023). Chronotype and synchrony effects in human cognitive performance: A systematic review. Chronobiology International.
- Juran, J. M. (1954). Universals in management planning and controlling. The Management Review, 43(11), 748-761.
- Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168-181.
- Loehr, J. & Schwartz, T. (2003). The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. Free Press.
- Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Hanover Square Press.
- Microsoft. (2025). Work Trend Index Annual Report 2025.
- Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central Publishing.
- White, M. P., et al. (2024). Associations between circadian alignment and cognitive functioning in a nationally representative sample of older adults. Scientific Reports.