Why Cutting Busywork Can Make You More Exhausted

Here is the career advice nobody saw coming: cutting busywork from your to-do list can make you more exhausted, not less. A study from Bielefeld University, published in early October in the journal Work & Stress, tracked what happens when employees lose tasks they see as pointless, and found that both increases and decreases in this workload were linked to higher emotional exhaustion than simply keeping things stable.

Researchers call these jobs "illegitimate tasks": work that feels unnecessary or unreasonable because it falls outside your actual role. Most past research measured how much of this work people carry at a single moment. Annika Schaefer and her colleagues took a different approach, following the same employees over time to see what happens when the volume of pointless work changes. Their answer upends the usual guidance: simply clearing busywork does not reliably lower stress. According to the study team, reductions in such tasks were associated with greater exhaustion, because change itself breeds uncertainty about what will be expected next.

How two studies caught the pattern

The team ran two studies in parallel. In one, employees answered survey questions about their work once a day; in the other, they answered once a week. That design let the researchers watch busywork levels rise and fall for the same people over time, instead of comparing different workers in one snapshot.

The results were symmetrical and surprising, as reported by phys.org: both rising and falling levels of illegitimate tasks predicted higher exhaustion than a stable level. The likely mechanism is perceived uncertainty. When your task list changes, what your job actually includes feels less predictable, and guessing at future expectations drains psychological resources even when the new load is lighter. The full account of the research, as reported by phys.org, frames the paper as especially timely given its release just ahead of World Mental Health Day.

Why clearing your plate can backfire

To be clear, the study is not an argument for keeping pointless tasks. "Fewer burdensome tasks are generally good news," co-author Kai C. Bormann said, according to the study team's announcement. The warning is narrower: removing work without explanation leaves a vacuum, and employees fill it with anxious guesses about what their boss now expects.

That distinction matters for anyone hoping their job gets lighter. Change that is explained clearly, with room for employees to ask questions, does not trigger the same fog. Unexplained change does. For young workers who are still learning what their roles actually include, the effect can hit harder, because every shift in the workload also reads as a signal about what the job might become.

Digital busywork is already everywhere

The finding lands in a workplace already saturated with digital busywork. A Samsung Canada survey of more than fifteen hundred adults found that three-quarters say technology helps them get things done faster. Yet nearly seven in ten say the same technology gives them more to manage, a productivity paradox in which every new tool adds overhead of its own. According to the survey's release, Canadians increasingly expect technology not just to help them reach their goals, but to simplify the steps along the way.

The friction shows up in ordinary moments. More than three-quarters of respondents said managing messages and notifications creates unnecessary effort or slows them down, while seven in ten said searching for information they know they have already seen slows them down. According to the survey findings, nearly half of Canadians end the day feeling busy without feeling as productive as expected, as reported by Samsung Canada's research team.

Gen Z feels the grind sharply: more than half say manual steps and switching between apps get in the way of progress, and a similar share report feeling mentally drained at least daily when technology and competing priorities pile up.

Workplace measurement firm Hubstaff reached a similar conclusion from a different angle. According to its latest benchmarks, as reported in workplace-analytics coverage, workers average only two to three hours of focus time a day, meeting volume has doubled, and employees juggle roughly eighteen apps daily, with hybrid teams posting the lowest share of focused time.

What to ask when your work changes

So what should you do with this research? If a manager announces that pointless work is being cleared off your plate, treat the announcement as the start of a conversation rather than the end of one. Ask which responsibilities are leaving and which are staying, what new expectations come with the change, and how success will be measured now. The study says the questions themselves are the antidote: clarity converts a stressful change into a lighter one, and cuts to busywork land better when everyone understands the new normal.

And if you are the one doing the cutting — automating a reporting step for your team or killing a recurring meeting — explain the reasoning out loud. People do not just need less busywork; they need to understand what replaces it. That is the difference between a change that restores energy and one that quietly spends it.

For more on how the way we work shapes our energy, browse the productivity section, including our earlier story on how workplace tech makes people faster and more stressed at the same time.