Is it really, though? I mean, I know how annoying 'busywork' can be. How meetings can feel like a waste of time. And for some jobs, that 80% is probably a grave underestimation. That said, work is never just about doing what you're best at. Collaboration can be time consuming tediousness but at the end of the day, there's topics that need to be discussed and decisions that need to be made as a team. It might be unstructured but it is still collaboration.The rest is fluff.
Sure. And water is good for you. Unless you get too much of it. And if you read through the research I linked to, collaboration is a Good Thing. It is the mountain of collaboration requests, and the poor methods (like meetings) within which people collaborate. Almost all meetings are wasteful. They are too long, too late, and too many people. Most meetings should be three people, standing in a hallway, discussing a specific point, for less than 5 minutes. And yet we have meetings with 7 people, scheduled for half an hour, three days from now (because that was the first opening when all 7 people were available). So yes. There is good collaboration. But the science proves that we very rarely engage in collaboration in a productive and sustainable way.
In that case your tl;dr wasn't quite clear enough to me. It seemed to me like you made a distinction between the unstructured collaboration and actual work, implying that we spend most of our time on useless busywork and only 20% on our own, non-collaborative work. What I was trying to say was that that even unstructured collaboration has a lot of useful moments, albeit spread out thinly.