I recently heard a quote that resonated with me: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together". I wonder if someone who treats these tasks as "non-work" is thinking of themselves as being more productive because they go faster than the folks around them, not considering that these other tasks that slow them down individually also help the team go farther in the long run...
Unless of course, they are not helping the team at all. Unless they are busywork we go through without ever looking at again or using it practically. Unless they are made to avoid making decision and then to avoid it again.
The company I work for have quite a lot of all hands presentations with content relevant to like ... 5 people. While everyone else nods, sleeps, reads reddit, zooms out daydreaming. We have diagrams that have nothing to do with anything, but make manager feel like she is controlling something.
We do not spend much time on ticked management tho. Which an argument against that idea too - you can in fact have functional ticket management without everyone spending too much time on it. But, I did seen overly complicated systems in the past that required constant fiddling.
It's always a balance. There is no universally-correct amount (or types) of meta-work to make a team function optimally.
For some teams, especially very small ones (and most especially if they're all volunteers), adding significant amounts of bookkeeping to their tasks is likely to be much more trouble than it's worth. (Though, again, even for some solo developers, the bookkeeping can be very valuable—it's all about the specifics of the projects and the ways different people operate.)
For other teams, not having the extra bookkeeping will mean that the people struggle to keep their tasks straight, or get abused by their managers, or have a variety of other problems.
The most important thing is to be reflecting on your and your team's work and processes, and being open to changes that might improve them.
> We have diagrams that have nothing to do with anything, but make manager feel like she is controlling something.
Guh, I remember at a previous job, one of my managers would always dedicate a multiple minutes to pie charts of types of tests done at the end of each sprint - the business stakeholders and the developers at the retrospectives couldn't have cared less that 30% of testing effort was spent on smoke testing compared to 28% last sprint.
