In "Office Space*, the guy says he spends all his time appeasing his many bosses and only gets 10 minutes of real work done in a week. At my corporate job, I spent at least two hours a day doing necessary tasks that didn't really count towards production, but would cause problems if not taken care of. I also routinely cleaned up messes left by the people being actively rewarded by management for their speed who achieved that by doing sloppy work.

I do freelance work these days. My corporate experience helps me not stress overly much about how little actual work seems to happen. There are always a bunch of tasks necessary to getting other things done that "don't count" as work.