How much of the work your organisation does exists because somebody still needs it and how much exists simply because nobody has ever stopped it?
This practical guide helps you identify work that has outlived its purpose, test whether it still creates value, and decide what can be stopped, simplified or changed.
Find the Work That Has Outlived Its Purpose
Most organisations contain work that nobody deliberately decided to keep.
A report was created because somebody needed visibility, a meeting solved a coordination problem, an approval was added after something went wrong or a reconciliation appeared because two systems didn’t agree.
At the time, each probably made sense but the problem is that organisations are much better at adding work than removing it.
People leave, systems change and problems disappear… but the work remains.
Before automating it, improving it or finding a faster way to do it, ask a simpler question:
Does this still need to happen at all?
Start With Recurring Work
Take 15 minutes and list the recurring activities that consume your team’s time, particularly looking for:
- reports and dashboards
- recurring meetings
- approvals and sign-offs
- reconciliations
- spreadsheet updates
- manual data entry
- status reporting
- duplicated checks and hand-offs
Don’t judge them yet, instead, for each one, answer two questions:
- Who uses the output?
- What decision or action does it enable?
If neither has a clear answer, you’ve found something worth investigating.
Don’t make unnecessary work more efficient…
…first find out whether it needs to exist.
Test Why the Work Exists
Now take each activity and ask why it exists.
Don’t settle for “we’ve always done it”, “management needs it” or “it’s part of the process”. Find the original purpose.
For each activity, ask:
- What problem was this created to solve?
- Does that problem still exist?
- Who would notice if we stopped doing it?
- What would actually happen if we did?
Be particularly suspicious of work where the answer is unclear or based on assumption rather than evidence.
- A report nobody reads isn’t valuable because it takes two hours instead of four.
- A meeting nobody needs isn’t useful because it only lasts 30 minutes.
- An approval that prevents nothing isn’t control.
The objective isn’t to prove that work is pointless; it’s to find out whether the reason for doing it still exists.
“We’ve always done it” explains the history…
…it doesn’t justify the future.
Decide What Happens Next
You should now have a smaller list of activities whose value is questionable.
For each one, make a simple decision:
- Stop - the need no longer exists.
- Simplify - the outcome matters, but the way you produce it doesn’t.
- Keep - the work still serves a clear purpose.
Where you’re unsure, simply test it.
Pause a report for a month, cancel one recurring meeting or remove an unnecessary approval and see what happens.
- If something genuinely breaks, you’ve learnt why the work matters.
- If nobody notices, you’ve learnt something more interesting.
The goal isn’t to remove work for the sake of it; it’s to create capacity for work that actually matters.
Sometimes the easiest way to discover whether work is valuable…
…is to stop doing it.
