Right now I'm working for a small startup, and we've been interacting a lot with big companies. I feel like a significant percentage of my time is made up of do

Right now I'm working for a small startup, and we've been interacting a lot with big companies. I feel like a significant percentage of my time is made up of doing "fake work." There are a lot of conference calls with like 15 people on them, and only about 2 or 3 are actually doing anything useful. The other 12 or 13 are making sure that they aren't missing anything important, because if they do, they won't ever be able to make it up. I guess the problem is that some of it actually needs to get done. It's just the coordination penalty of trying to interface two totally different companies together. I think the primary cause of fake work is inefficient communication, requiring people to do extra work to cope for that. It seems like the solution is better communication systems that allow things to be documented.