The Question Nobody Answers Honestly
Ask a construction PM how much time they spend on paperwork and you'll get some version of "way too much." Ask them for a number and they'll hesitate — because they've never actually tracked it. It just bleeds into every part of the day. A submittal here, a change order there, twenty minutes chasing an approval that should've come back yesterday.
The industry talks about this problem constantly but rarely puts real numbers on it. Vendors throw around big claims to sell software. PMs shrug it off as part of the gig. I wanted to know what the actual data says — not from a marketing page, but from industry sources and conversations with construction teams running real projects.
The Real Numbers
Here's what I found, broken down by the categories that eat the most PM time:
General documentation — daily reports, safety logs, change orders, punch lists. Industry estimates put this at 4 to 6 hours per week for a typical PM. Most of that time isn't spent on the content itself. It's spent on formatting, finding the right template, tracking down the current version, and figuring out who needs to review what.
Submittals — preparing packages, routing them for review, tracking status, following up on returns. This one varies wildly by project phase. During steady-state construction, a PM might spend 3 to 5 hours a week on submittals. During peak submittal periods early in a project, that number can double or triple. On complex builds like hospitals or labs, project engineers have reported spending 20+ hours a week just on submittal review — cross-referencing 70-page manufacturer cut sheets against project specs, line by line.
Change orders — reviewing PDFs, entering line items and subtotals into Procore, double-checking the math. Each one takes about 15 minutes of manual work. On a project with 600 to 1,000+ change orders, that's 150 to 250 hours over the life of the project. Week to week it might not feel massive, but it accumulates relentlessly.
The overhead nobody counts — chasing approvals via email, managing version control on drawings, coordinating who needs to see what and when. This is the hardest category to quantify because it's woven into everything else. But it's real, and every PM knows the feeling of spending thirty minutes tracking down whether a submittal was returned or is still sitting on someone's desk.
The total: For a PM on a mid-size commercial project, 8 to 15 hours per week on administrative document work is a reasonable estimate. During peak phases — early project submittals, heavy change order periods, closeout — that can easily hit 20 or more.
That's a quarter to nearly half of a PM's working week spent on tasks that don't involve managing the actual project.
Why It Matters More Than People Think
The problem isn't just the hours. It's what those hours displace.
Every hour a PM spends typing change order data into Procore is an hour they're not on-site catching a coordination issue before it becomes a change order of its own. Every afternoon lost to submittal tracking is an afternoon they're not managing the schedule or having the hard conversation with a sub who's falling behind.
There are downstream financial effects too. Change orders that sit unentered mean vendor payments can't move forward. Submittals that stall in the review process push procurement timelines, which push installation timelines, which push everything. And the compounding mental load of constant administrative work — the feeling of never being caught up — is one of the biggest drivers of burnout in an industry that already struggles to retain talent.
A PM's highest-value work is judgment, coordination, and problem-solving. Paperwork crowds all three out.
What Can Actually Be Done About It
I'll be honest: some of this work is irreducible. A PM needs to review documents, make judgment calls, sit in coordination meetings, and communicate with owners and subs. That's the job, and no amount of automation changes it.
But a meaningful chunk of administrative time is purely mechanical. Reading a PDF and retyping its contents into Procore fields. Manually triggering review sessions when new submittals arrive. Chasing document versions across email threads. These tasks don't require human judgment — they require a human only because nobody's built the alternative.
That's where automation fits. Not as a replacement for the PM, but as a way to strip out the mechanical layer so they can focus on the parts of the job that actually require a brain. I wrote a detailed breakdown of how this works for change orders specifically, including the real numbers from a system I built for a national GC's team — 173 hours saved per project on change orders alone.
The broader point is this: automation in construction isn't about adopting a new platform or ripping out your tech stack. It's about plugging into what you already run — Procore, Bluebeam, whatever your team uses — and making the repetitive parts disappear into the background.
The Bottom Line
If you're a PM and these numbers feel familiar, that's not a coincidence. The industry has accepted administrative overload as a cost of doing business. It doesn't have to be.
The first step is just knowing the number. Track your admin hours for a week — actually track them — and see where you land. You might be surprised how much of your week is going to work that a system could handle while you focus on running the project.
Connor Goulding is the founder of Goldsmith Growth, where he builds AI automations that help companies eliminate operational busywork. He has a decade of experience in marketing and operations consulting, and an unhealthy obsession with making manual work disappear.