Work comes from a few well defined places and when we get work from outside of those places bad things often happen. You should be able to trace what you do back to these six things. When you cannot, the task is not the best thing for you to be doing. Self generated work is inefficient. Your boss sees most self-generated work as time and energy wasted on unimportant things.
Sources of Your Work
1) Your Job Description
This is, when current, why you were hired in the first place and why you are being kept around. If there is a task in your job description, it should be no surprise that it is a task you ought to be doing. This is the primary place your work is defined, but it is not the only place. Too many people treat this at the end-all-be-all. This limited thinking limits your growth potential in the organization. If you want promote into your boss’ job someday, you have to do be able to do work beyond your current role. How are you ever going to learn how to do that work or prove that you can, if you limit yourself only to your current job description?
2) Your Boss
It seems obvious that your boss can give you work, and it should be. Your boss controls your future in the organization. If she assigns work to you, you have to do it (within the bounds of law and ethics). If you ever feel like you have extra capacity (it can happen), ask your boss what work you can take off her plate. This will ensure that not only are you doing useful work for the organization, but that you are enabling your boss to be more effective and you are expanding your skill and your reputation.
3) Law
There are some tasks that you do that have no productive value when it comes to the bottom line or the purpose of your organization. The legal authorities have put several of these have been put in place. The tasks may serve a greater societal purpose or not. It does not matter; you have to do the work or the authorities will have somthing ill to say about it. Your organization may have a whole office set aside for regulatory compliance. This is just the cost of doing what your organization does. Do not waste any of your time bickering about doing the work; just do it. Let the legal team or the hired lobbyists fight it out.
4) Organizational Policies
Your organization may have instituted policies that look arbitrary to you. Until you are in a position to influence them, treat these as near legal requirements. These exist for a reason, often a good one. From time to time the reason has past and the policy remains. But more often, the reason is still valid, just obscured. Fill our your travel report and the expense report, even if you don’t see the purpose in it. This is part of the tax of being a part of an organization. Organizations have some inherent inefficiencies that dull the benefits of getting diverse people together to work on a common problem. You don’t have to like it; you just have to do the work that comes from it.
5) Building Relationships
Another task that comes from being a part of an organization is the need to build relationships with your coworkers. You will need their assistance or their support in the future to get your work done effectively. Building relationships is therefore a part of your unwritten job description. Even if it feels like you are not doing anything productive spending ten minutes talking to the guy from accounting, the relationship may save you a lot of time later. The next time you travel and the tickets aren’t purchased yet because of an accounting error, having a good relationship with someone who understands the problem better can save you a lot of time and hastle.
6) Environmental/Market Demands
Finally, the current environment will dictate what tasks you have. Everything from the a storm rolling in on your workplace to a recall of a product will give you tasks you would have not foreseen otherwise. This category is not a free license to work on whatever you want because the market demands it. Instead, it is for those times when events dictate to the organization what needs doing and not when the organization is in control.
Conclusion
Spend your time and energy on what provides value to the organization expects. When you cannot trace the reason for doing what you are doing to one of these six things, you are probably providing little value. Work you do that is disjointed from what the rest of the organization is doing