Just dealing with internal folks, including your boss, takes up a whole lot of time and energy for B2B marketers and Supply Chain managers. Being folks that are at the boundary of the organization and facing outside you should be spending between 70-80% of your time with the customers or thinking about how to serve them better. OK if you are on the supply side you should be spending 70-80% time between suppliers,internal users and marketing to figure out where your organization is going and how you can bring your skills to bear.
To start with both sides should have deep knowledge about where the organization is going, what needs it is trying to serve and if things are changing at high speed as in on-line search, spend time on training as Google is doing with Product Spotlight.
But when you tally the time you spend in attending numerous barely relevant meetings, dealing with unrelated issues many of them just organizational politics, you find yourself exhausted. You find that on many days you are able to devote only about 20 % of your time,energy and focus on the "real" core of your role and job description and 80% on "other stuff". But hey- the organizational distractions which seem unproductive are part of organizational life be it voluntary non-profit organizations, professional organizations, religious organizations for-profit firms and yes Governments and political parties worldwide.
Staying focused on your role and dealing with within organizational distractions as a fact of life might be a way to be more productive.Also as one top leader of a food company once mentioned at a seminar, it helps to be "nice" throughout the so called distractions because although they are not mentioned in the job description – distractions come with the territory. Complicating things is that you don't really take a class on this in college….