According to Atlassian's State of Teams 2024 report, 25 billion hours are lost each year to inefficient teamwork. If that number sounds absurdly large, that’s because it is. And it’s a wake-up call.
Engineering and product teams aren’t short on talent or ambition. They’re short on time — or more accurately, they’re bogged down by misused time. From endless meetings to scattered tools and unclear goals, most teams are working harder than ever… but getting less done.
So where’s all the time going? And more importantly, how do we get it back?
Research from Atlassian, GitLab, McKinsey and others show that these five recurring productivity patterns are holding your team back. We’ll discuss each of them and share how you can fix them.
1. Meeting Overload
Meetings are supposed to move work forward. But more often, they pull us away from it. Research shows that nearly 3 out of 4 meetings are used to plan other meetings and 72% of meeting time is considered unproductive by attendees.
Even short Agile rituals like standups can add to this. A 15-minute daily standup for an 8-person team consumes ~500 hours per year and if it regularly runs long, you’re looking at nearly $36K/year in salaries just on status updates.
👥Meetings are ineffective 72% of the time. They aren't bad. They're just poorly done. Research shows that the meeting culture in most organization makes it harder for teams to reach their goals.
How to Fix it:
- A calendar audit to cut or shorten recurring meetings
- Always including goals + agenda in invites. Use Rally to convert your Jira work items to Agendas so that all meetings move your work forward.
- Shifting status updates to async (like Loom videos or Rally sessions)
- Blocking off focus time — e.g., no-meeting Wednesdays
🎯 Pro tip: Atlassian replaced one recurring meeting with async videos and saved 5,000 hours in two weeks.
2. Interruptions & Context Switching
Developers do their best work in flow, that deep, focused state where ideas turn into code. But it’s hard to maintain this flow when Slack pings, emails, bug reports, and meeting reminders are going off all day. Every interruption pulls you out of the zone and into something else.
It’s not just distracting. It’s draining. Research shows that 68% of employees end up prioritizing messages over meaningful work. And getting back into focus isn’t instant. After each interruption, it takes an average of 23 minutes to truly re-engage.
The result? A whole lot of activity, but not much real progress.
⏱️It takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to a task after a distraction. The average knowledge worker switches tasks about every three minutes and once distracted, a worker can take nearly half-hour to resume the original task.
Fix it with:
- Protected focus blocks (e.g., 2–3 hour deep work windows)
- Async-first culture: use issue comments, videos, or Rally’s chat (tied directly to Jira issues)
- Designated office hours for questions
- Smarter notifications (snoozing low-priority channels)
- AI or automation to reduce routine context switches (e.g., CI alerts, summary bots)
3. Tool Fragmentation & Siloed Info
The average employee loses 20 hours/week chasing information across systems.
Most teams use 8–15 tools daily — project trackers, chat apps, docs, code repos, calendars, dashboards, etc. Without strong integration, people spend alot of time just looking for things. According to Quickbase, 70% of workers waste a full workday per week navigating fragmented systems.
Fix it with:
- Consolidating tools where possible (e.g., Rally unifies chat, estimation, capacity planning around Jira)
- Smart integrations to link work across systems (e.g., Confluence ↔ Jira ↔ Slack)
- Internal knowledge hubs (like Stack Overflow for Teams or Notion)
- Dashboards that show real-time project status
4. Unclear Goals & Shifting Priorities
Nothing derails a sprint faster than vague or shifting priorities. If your team doesn’t know what matters most, they either try to do everything (bad) or guess what to do next (worse).
❓34% of workers regularly have to guess their priorities
Fix it with:
How Rally Brings Clarity to Agile Teams
Fragmentation is a common challenge for teams. Priorities are scattered across tools, discussions drift off-topic, and goals feel disconnected. Rally solves this by offering a unified space where teams discuss and align directly on their Jira work items. Every conversation stays tied to the backlog items that drive your project forward.
Unlike other chat tools and emails, Rally anchors discussions in context. By keeping conversations focused on the work at hand, it eliminates distractions and keeps your team aligned on priorities.
Rally also acts as your team’s virtual facilitator. Its AI features generates questions for each Jira item, helping you spot gaps in backlog grooming, identify missing acceptance criteria, and uncover potential blockers. This proactive guidance ensures nothing slips through the cracks, saving your team from unnecessary meetings and confusion.
From sprint planning to mid-cycle check-ins, Rally fosters alignment, so your team focuses on what truly matters.
5. Chaotic Planning & Inefficient Processes
Planning chaos shows up in fire drills, unrealistic sprints, scope creep, and Agile rituals that go through the motions without adding value. According to Atlassian, some teams spend 50% more time in planning/status meetings than executing their work.
Fix it with:
Conclusion
If your team is losing time to meetings, managing work across different tools, or unclear about your priorities, the problem is how work is managed. Rally helps you fix that by bringing clarity and alignment directly into your Jira workflow. It gives your team one shared space to plan and discuss your work, all tied to the respective Jira tickets.
Its capacity planning, chat, and autogenerated questions surface gaps and blockers early, keeping everyone on the same page and moving your work forward. Set up your Rally session today and give your team a hub for focused, productive work.