updating [but no new work]

Whilst you personally may very well want more work, BOINC is simply telling you that (in its humble opinion) you don't need more work at the moment. In most cases BOINC makes this decision because it has calculated that other projects are currently more deserving of your computers spare CPU cycles. Also in most cases BOINC is perfectly correct to make this decision and will do quite nicely in managing everything for you without you needing to force the issue in any way.

If you wish to know why BOINC has made this decision, you will need to provide a lot more information about what other projects you run on your computer and what resource shares you have allocated to them. You also need to tell us how often you have your computer running BOINC and whether or not any of your projects have been in deadline trouble recently. It would also be useful to know the values of various parameters in your state file (client_state.xml) which is in your BOINC folder and can be browsed with the Notepad program, for example, as long as you are careful not to make or save any changes. The values of variables like on_frac, active_frac, cpu_efficiency, long_term_debt, short_term_debt, duration_correction_factor, etc, could all have a bearing on why BOINC is declining to get more EAH work.

As you can probably imagine, the process of scheduling work is quite complex. A good way to start to understand this complexity is to check out the information on the Work Scheduler in the Unofficial BOINC Wiki. Another source of quick information is the Boinc FAQ Service which has several FAQs covering various aspects of your question.

If, after looking at all the above, you still feel that BOINC has got it wrong, tell us more about your setup and the variables mentioned and then stop and restart BOINC. After the restart, cut and paste here about the first 20 or so lines of messages that you see on the messages tab of Boinc Manager. We would then be in a much better position to give a more definitive answer.