You're listening to TED Talks Daily.

I'm your host, Elise Hu.

Between remote work, hybrid work, and what today's speaker calls collaborative work,

our task lists can feel endless.

So in this episode for TED's The Way We Work series,

Leadership expert Rob Cross offers ways to break free from collaboration overload so we can have more choices on how we spend our time.

Collaborative work is everything we do to come up with big new ideas and make plans to bring them to life with other people.

The modern workplace is set up with so many ways to foster collaboration, meetings and brainstorming sessions, Zooms and Slack channels, email, instant messaging,

so many tools to help us work closely together.

And aspects of this are great, but we're doing more collaborative work than ever before,

and the problem is it's overloading us.

From launching a new product to creating a vaccine, almost every endeavor we do at work requires

working with others towards a common goal. And collaboration is a great thing. It can help us work

better and smarter. It can help us come up with ideas we never would have had on our own. And it can make us happier than executing tasks alone.

But collaborative work has risen 50% over the past decade. It's now taking up to 85% of most

people's work weeks. And those numbers from my research were pre-pandemic. Studies show that people

are working five to eight hours

more a week now with collaborations drifting earlier into the morning and later into the evening.

When I came into this research, I was 100% convinced the enemy was external. It was emails,

time zones, and demanding clients, to name just a few. But after hundreds of interviews,

I've discovered that even when given a choice not to

participate, people are taking on more collaborative work than ever before. We're just too

...