Kill your vampire tasks before they suck away your productivity

Struggling to get all your work done? Feel like there’s too much admin to wade through before you can do your actual job? You’re being sucked dry by a vampire — but you don’t need to call Buffy, these are “vampire tasks”.

Having too many maintenance bits and bobs standing in the way of your real work isn’t new, with American workers spending almost half their day on meetings and administrative tasks even back in 2014. But modern workplace discourse demands a viral nickname, and thanks to Cecily Motley, Co-Founder of workplace assistant Harriet, we’ve got “vampire tasks”.

“It’s those dull, time-sucking tasks like scheduling meetings and responding to emails that drain your energy and take time away from deep-focus work or higher-value projects,” she tells CNBC. “That constant influx of administrative tasks can hurt productivity the most.”

Of course, we can’t all be perfectly productive all of the time; research suggests most people have about five hours of creative, focused work in them each day, though of course it will differ by person and role. Either way, that suggests a bit of admin can be a welcome break, but too much is clearly a burden.

Let AI fight your admin demons

Given the nature of the company she founded, it’s no wonder Motley would like us to discuss the annoying admin that clogs up our day — her startup seeks to automate them away, after all. But it is worth considering tools like AI, especially with the arrival of Microsoft Copilot offering automated assistance in tasks like summarising documents, building presentations, and even taking notes from Teams meetings on your behalf.

There are other options. As with Copilot for Teams, AI transcription tool Otter.ai can let you skip a meeting and still read back what everyone said, and you can attempt to build a custom GPT using ChatGPT to help with specialised tasks.

Just make sure that the output for any of these tools is accurate before making any key business decisions, and don’t use consumer-level AI at work without checking you’re allowed. As Nvidia’s release of Chat with RTX highlights, it can be dangerous to share company info online.

If in doubt, talk to your manager first. That said, managers should realise that admin is standing in the way of real work, and do everything in their power — AI or otherwise — to limit such productivity hurdles.

How to kill your vampire tasks

Motley offers a few AI-free tricks: schedule known tasks to block out time in your day and avoid distractions, switch off email and other messaging notifications like Slack when you need to focus, and decline additional work, such as unnecessary meetings.

It’s also worth analysing how you spend your time — and how you feel when you do it.

Do your best, most productive thinking right when you sit down at your desk in the morning? Block out time for creative work, with no meetings, no email and no admin.

Feel sluggish and dull after lunch? Use that time to catch up on necessary but simple tasks like paperwork, checking through emails, and going through meeting invites.

The aim is to block out chunks of time to focus on specific tasks, avoiding interruptions as well as multitasking.

Ensure that you’re blocking out the right amount of time for these tasks: too much, and you’ll stretch the work to fill the time, and too little will leave you feeling stressed and time pushed.

Ignore your email

Email is the Dracula of vampire tasks. Surveys say it eats up anywhere from a quarter to half of our working days. Of course, not all email messages are time wasters and they need to be read and responded to eventually.

The trick, say experts, is to check email less frequently. Turn off your notifications to reduce interruptions, and open up your inbox between other tasks. That’s because it takes us as long as 23 minutes to recover our focus after being distracted, according to research from the University of California.

With the rise in flexible, time-shifted work, many professionals have taken to adding a line to their email that stresses they don’t need an immediate response, something like: “I work flexible hours but please don’t respond to this email outside of your working hours.”

Setting clear boundaries and clearly — and honestly — communicating the importance (or not) of an immediate response means everyone is on the same page. Most email can wait, so let it.