Accounting filing taxes and managing payroll is "the work".

Accounting having meetings about which tax software to use this year is "not the work, but is planning how to do the work"

HR making job listings and filtering candidates is "the work"

HR having meetings about how to navigate a change to remote hiring is "not the work, but is planning how to do the work"

My point is that if you have the meeting but don't actually execute on anything, you haven't actually done any work.

And meetings that don't result in anything you can execute on are absolutely outside the realm of work altogether.