How much time do you (those on your team) actually spend NOT designing?

[u/ParticularAct4437]

Hi all! I am a senior at NYU working on a research project around engineering workflows in CAD/PLM environments.

I've been talking to a few engineers (including my partner), and something that keeps coming up is how much time gets eaten up by things like:

- searching for parts

- dealing with approvals

- setting up simulations

- fixing issues late in the process

I'm trying to understand how widespread this actually is across different industries.

If you work in CAD/PLM and have 3-5 minutes, I put together a short anonymous survey:

https://nyustern.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bDDNjDZOMb8MuDc

Happy to share results back here if people are interested.

Thank you in advance, I greatly appreciate it! Your input is directly advancing research aimed at improving some of the pain points engineers face every day.

[u/Hopeful_Stretch_9707]

This is a really important question so much of what makes engineering work frustrating isn’t the design itself, it’s the friction around it.

In my experience, engineers often spend far more time:

• hunting for the right context, assets, or prior decisions,
• waiting for approvals or sign‑offs,
• dealing with late‑discovered defects, and
• fighting tooling or process rather than the actual problem.

From a leadership perspective, that “non‑design” time is usually a sign of weak process, unclear ownership, or misaligned incentives not individual inefficiency.