Work About Work: Marketing’s Second Job, and Why Asana Is a Symptom

Asana has a phrase for the thing that eats a marketing team’s week, and it is a good one: work about work. Communicating about tasks. Searching for information. Switching between apps. Managing shifting priorities. Chasing the status of work. Asana’s Anatomy of Work research has put it at around 60 percent of a knowledge worker’s time for years, 61 percent in the United States in the 2021 edition, based on surveys of more than ten thousand knowledge workers.

Asana publishes this number to sell Asana. That is the irony this post is about. The number is right. The conclusion, that the cure for work about work is a tool whose purpose is to record work about work, is the part worth examining.

Marketing’s version is specific

Work about work in a marketing team is not abstract. It has a shape, and it is worse than the average because a piece of marketing crosses more hands and more tools than almost anything else a company produces.

Take one email. It is briefed in a doc. Drafted in another doc. Reviewed in comments, then in a Slack thread, then in a meeting. Designed in a design tool by someone who was asked in a message. Built in the email tool by someone with access. Approved by email. Scheduled in the email tool. Tracked, throughout, on a board, where a human moves a card from “Drafting” to “In review” to “Changes requested” to “In review” to “Approved” to “Scheduled”, each time by hand, each time after the fact.

Now count the work about work. The brief had to be found. The draft had to be chased. The review happened in three places and had to be reconciled. The design request had to be followed up. The build was a hand-off with a wait. The approval was an email that sat. And the card on the board was moved six times by someone whose actual job was none of those things, which is why, two weeks in, the card says “In review” and the piece is already live.

We measured where the hours go in the 60 percent tax on small marketing teams. Optimizely’s 2026 survey of UK marketers found almost half spend a quarter of their week on admin, and that slow approvals are the biggest single source of unnecessary work, cited by 38 percent. Different survey, same shape.

What a project management tool does with it

Here is the honest description of what Asana, Monday, ClickUp or Notion do for a marketing team’s work about work: they give it a home.

The board is where the chasing happens. It is where the status is recorded, by hand, as a copy of the real state that lives in the doc, the design tool, the email tool and the inbox. It is where priorities are shuffled. It is the app you switch to in order to find out which app the work is in.

That is not nothing. A home for coordination is better than coordination in Slack. But it is a second ledger. Every time a piece moves in the real world, someone has to make the same move on the board, and the board is only as current as the last person who remembered. Caches without invalidation go stale, and the board is a cache. We walked through why that kills the tool within a quarter in why marketing teams abandon their project management tool.

So the project tool does not reduce work about work. It records it, in a place that itself requires work to maintain. For a team of three, the board is one more thing that is nobody’s job.

That is what it means to call Asana a symptom. A company that needs a board to know the status of its marketing has marketing whose status is not readable from the work. The board is a workaround for that, and a reasonable one, given the alternative was asking in Slack. But it treats the symptom.

The two ledgers

To be fair to the project tools, marketing work runs on two ledgers, and they are only wrong for one of them.

The coordination ledger holds launches, events, agency deliverables, hiring, the rebrand, the quarterly OKRs. These are projects with dependencies and owners and dates, and they live in many systems by nature. A project tool is the right home for them, and the small team should keep one for exactly this.

The content and campaign ledger holds pieces: the email, the post, the page, the sequence, their drafts, their reviews, their approvals, their sends, their results. This is most of what a marketing team actually does in a week, and it is where the work about work accumulates, because a piece’s state changes a dozen times between brief and live and every change is a card to move. We made this split, with a worked month, in does a small marketing team need project management software.

Put the second ledger on a board and you get the stale cache. Put the second ledger in a system where the piece and its status are the same object and the cache disappears, because there is nothing to copy.

Making the work the status

The only thing that removes work about work, rather than recording it, is a system in which the piece carries its own state.

That means the email is drafted, reviewed, approved, built and sent in one place, and that place knows which of those it has done. Nobody moves a card, because there is no card; there is the email, and it is either in draft, in review, Ready, or sent, and anyone can see which. Nobody chases a review, because the review agent has already read it for language, brand and claims, and the reviewer’s comments sit on the passage rather than in a thread. Nobody switches to the design tool, because the image was made from the approved copy inside the brand look. Nobody switches to the build tool, because the draft is the thing that sends. Nobody asks what shipped last week, because what shipped is visible, with the revenue traced to it.

This is the model behind Marqeable, described in what a content factory is. Its effect on work about work is not that the coordination got faster. It is that most of it stopped being necessary. The status meeting that existed because nobody trusted the board becomes a decision meeting, or no meeting, which we argued in the weekly marketing status meeting exists because nobody trusts the board.

What stays on the board

The coordination ledger. The launch as a project, with the event booked, the PR agency’s deliverable, the hire that needs to start first. Those have owners outside marketing and dates outside the content system, and the board is where they belong.

What should come off it is every card that is a copy of a piece’s state. If the card says “Email: in review” and the email itself knows it is in review, the card is work about work, and the person who maintains it has a better use for the minute. The test for each column is in the abandonment post: if this column is a second write of something that already has a first write somewhere else, delete the column.

Three questions for a marketing leader looking at their own board.

1. How many cards on the board are pieces of content or campaign work, as opposed to projects? At a $20M company we have seen roughly four in five.
2. When was each of those cards last moved, and does its status match reality right now? The gap is the work about work the board is generating rather than absorbing.
3. If the board disappeared tomorrow, which of those pieces would you be unable to find the status of? Those are the ones whose status needs to live with the work, not beside it.

Frequently asked questions

What is work about work?

Asana’s term for the activity that surrounds real work without being it: communicating about tasks, searching for information, switching between apps, managing shifting priorities and chasing the status of work. Asana’s Anatomy of Work research has put it at around 60 percent of a knowledge worker’s time, with the US figure at 61 percent in the 2021 edition.

Does a marketing team need Asana?

For launches, events, hiring and agency coordination, a project tool is fine. For the content and campaign work, which is most of what a small marketing team does, it is a second ledger that has to be updated by hand every time a piece moves, and it goes stale within weeks. The fix is not a better board. It is a system where the piece and its status are the same object.

How much of a marketer’s time goes to admin?

Surveys vary but point the same way. Asana’s research puts work about work near 60 percent for knowledge workers generally. Optimizely’s 2026 UK survey found almost half of marketers spend a quarter of their week on admin, with slow approvals the biggest source of unnecessary work. Marketing sits on the high side because every piece crosses more tools and more hands than most work.

How does Marqeable remove work about work?

By keeping the piece, its state, its reviews, its approvals and its send in one place. There is nothing to copy into a board, nothing to chase, no tool to switch to for the build. A person can see what is drafted, what is waiting on whom and what shipped without asking anyone, because the work itself is the status.

The bottom line

Asana is right that about 60 percent of a knowledge worker’s time is work about work, and marketing is on the high side, because every piece crosses more hands and more tools than almost anything else. But a project tool gives that work a home rather than removing it. The board is a hand-maintained copy of state that lives elsewhere, and it goes stale, and maintaining it is itself work about work.

Keep a board for the coordination ledger. For the pieces, use a system where the piece carries its own state: drafted, reviewed, approved, sent and traced to revenue in one place. That is what Marqeable is, and it is why a team of three can see what is drafted, what is waiting and what shipped without asking anyone. The time that comes back is spent on the only two jobs that need a person: deciding what to say and approving it. More leads generated, and more of them won as customers.

See each station of the factory: build campaigns from one brief, review and approve content, run follow-up with automations, answer visitors with website chat, and tie revenue to the exact message with attribution.

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