[hrabago]

The key is to identify how you can best contribute, so you know whether or not you're wasting your time. If you're a small team, everyone's time might be best spent coding to deliver the product. A slightly bigger team might mean your time is best coordinating. The overhead of a "meeting" might be worth making sure everyone's aware of the design instead of creating isolated pieces of great code that doesn't work well with each other.

I might be wasting time writing code when I can best contribute by taking care of 'overhead' so my team isn't blocked - there's an anecdote here somewhere of the PM who would buy coffee for the team so the team can focus on producing code - or i might be wasting time taking care of 'overhead' that doesn't matter yet (planning the optimum office layout) when I can best contribute by writing code.

To know whether or not you're wasting time, you have to know what makes one work "fake" and the other "good", and my list may be vastly different from yours.