It’s 9:07 on a Monday morning, and your calendar is already a battlefield. Three status calls. A project update due by noon. A meeting you’ll spend frantically taking notes in, so you can later copy those notes into a project tracker that half the team won’t read. Someone’s already pinged you on Slack asking for “the latest” on something you just sent out Friday.
Welcome to the modern reality of project management.
It’s supposed to make work easier. It’s the discipline designed to bring order to chaos, align teams, and get things over the finish line. And yet, despite decades of new tools, methodologies, and certifications, most project managers will tell you the same thing: they still spend far too much of their time on repetitive, low-value tasks instead of leading their projects forward.
It’s not for lack of trying. The industry is overflowing with platforms that promise to streamline workflows, dashboards that display real-time metrics, and frameworks that guarantee efficiency. But beneath all that polish, a familiar problem remains: project managers are still bogged down by the administrative grind.
The numbers tell an interesting story:
- “Organizations that are ineffective with project management waste 21 times more money than those with the highest performing project management capabilities.” – Mark A. Langley, President & CEO, Project Management Institute. The 2018 Pulse of the Profession®, a global survey conducted by Project Management Institute
- Around US$1 million is wasted every 20 seconds worldwide due to poor project management practices. That’s roughly $2 trillion a year. (2018 Pulse of the Profession®) The 2018 Pulse of the Profession®, a global survey conducted by Project Management Institute
- 91% of project managers say their organizations face project management issues. (Smartsheet Future of Work Management Report 2023)
That’s not just a lot of money, it’s a massive amount of wasted human energy.
The Hidden Time Sink for Project Managers
Anyone who has been in a PM role knows the reality; you’re the glue that holds the project together. You’re updating project tracking software, taking notes in meetings, documenting action items, following up with stakeholders, and making sure deadlines are visible and understood. You’re reporting on project health, flagging risks, and trying to anticipate problems before they derail everything.
The crazy thing is? Most of these tasks could, in theory, be automated or at least made dramatically easier. But in practice, PMs are still doing them by hand, copying notes from one place to another, nudging team members for updates, and building custom reports from scratch.
The reality is a vicious cycle: the more time spent maintaining the project, the less time available to lead it. The less time you spend leading, the more likely it is that things slip through the cracks.
Why It’s Costing So Much
When we talk about the $2 trillion wasted annually, it’s tempting to think of it as an abstract, global number. But at the ground level, it’s very real:
- It’s the marketing campaign delayed because the content team didn’t know design had fallen behind.
- It’s the engineering sprint that missed its deadline because blockers weren’t logged in time.
- It’s the leadership team that makes a decision based on outdated project data.
These small breakdowns in coordination and accountability add up fast, and they happen because project managers are too busy managing the mechanics to focus on the bigger picture.
The Gap Between Tools and Reality
It’s not that software tools haven’t helped. They have. But even the most advanced platforms still depend on human beings to feed them timely, accurate data. And that’s where reality intrudes:
- People forget to log updates.
- Notes get lost in personal documents.
- Status meetings get rescheduled, so the information flow slows down.
And who picks up the slack? The project manager.
Until we bridge that gap between “what the tool can do” and “what actually happens in the day-to-day,” PMs will keep spending hours every week chasing the information they need instead of acting on it.
A Better Path Forward
The industry has made huge strides, but the core inefficiency remains: too much of a project manager’s time is spent on busywork that doesn’t move the project forward. What’s needed now isn’t just another dashboard, it’s a system that actively keeps projects on track without requiring constant manual upkeep.
At Superdone, we’re tackling some of the biggest issues facing project management today, from automating the repetitive parts of the job to giving teams a clearer, real-time view of project health. We believe project managers should spend their time leading their teams, not chasing updates.
We’ll be sharing more as we get closer to launch, but for now, we’ll just say: the days of needless project management busywork are numbered.
