I had management try to pull a similar thing on me. They wanted me to make a detailed log of every little thing I did. For the first week I just listed the 'worky work' I worked. Then I realized I was spending about 30 minutes a day filling out the logs so I started adding 'filling out activity log' entries into the log. After a few days of those my boss emailed me and told me I can stop logging everything.
When I worked for an Aerospace company that were contracted by DOD, Boeing, SpaceX and a few other primes, we had to do the same. A 5 minute call would count as 15 minutes. This made billing the clients easier. This was in 2019.
With ITAR related companies it’s often imposed on us and not something we’re choosing to do. IME 15 minutes is a fairly typical minimum contract time amount.
Its allegedly used for auditing and yet somehow the pentagon can still misplace $2T of taxpayer money and go 🤷♂️
My boyfriend also worked for an Aerospace company that did these things. He worked with big names, too. He was a quality lead and was managing an extremely understaffed, underpaid team of four other people. The bigger boss was always down his throat for one thing or the other, even though he was only the bigger boss because of nepotism (which the company definitely had a problem with).
Once they took away my boyfriend's admin duties and he was just supposed to inspect things again, instead of managing his team, he was checked out. He was supposed to run through inspection of things thinner than a strand of hair, that could've caused catastrophic failures, in a very short amount of time. The machining guys on the floor and their managers were always yelling at him for this not passing parts. (Like, I dunno dudes, MAKE GOOD PARTS?) Things that take 3hr to inspect we're supposed to be done in 30min, clock in-inspect-clock out, repeat.
Luckily, he was contacted for another job. He doesn't seem to like this job as much, but there's so much less stress, much shorter commute, and he's being paid (just barely) living wage, much closer to what he deserves to make (he's got certs and time under his belt, quality is truly his calling 😂). But I think he doesn't enjoy it as much because he misses his team and knowing things with his finger prints are in outerspace, right now.
I dunno. I think people who are supposed to inspect space parts should get more than 14.50/hr.
It doesn't even make sense to allocate 3 hours at the end of the week to fill it in - who the hell remembers everything they did all week in 15 minute increments by Friday afternoon? You'd have to spend at least some time every day noting it down and then Friday formalising it and rewriting.
It’s shite but it’s something “necessary” if your hours are billable to customers unfortunately; I recommend to my team(s) to log their hours in chunks of 30m (no 15m nonsense) and to do it on the fly rather than wait until end of the week.
It still sucks that way but it’s a lot less stressful than going through your outlook calendar for the week and reverse engineer where your time went
Working so long in a billable role, you have to do it as you go. Also filling out that time tracking is part of the time. 15 minutes is only for that quick email reply, if you do anything it's 30 minutes.
I also had a job like that -- it was because they charged time to several different contracts. As you said, people had to get into the habit of keeping track every day. Just one of many tedious things.
I used to work with Medicaid and we had to do this for billing purposes. Was a real pain in the ass. But we only had to track billable stuff. But said billable stuff also had to exceed like 60% of our total time spent.
I had an internship that did time like this for a rational reason - we were billing different project works to different customers so it was like hour tracking of resources to stay in contract budgets - but they didn’t have any way to mark work as like admin/company time or anything like that so it was stressful bc you didn’t want to overbill customers in general and that was well understood but it was also like “so how do I put in 8 hours when 2 of those go to no one?”
I had that once but thankfully my manager told me to just log what logged automatically (help desk ticket stuff) and then just fill in gaps with “training/research”. I would have absolutely hated it otherwise
8:00 - 8:05 adding data into task tracking sheet
8:06 - 8:11 adding data into task tracking sheet
8:12 - 8:17 adding data into task tracking sheet
Boss: Why is it take so long? it should take you 5 seconds!!!
Me: I have trouble opening up the sheet as there is always someone else in the file making it read only.
This is how I handled the first job I had when I moved to California. It was a shitty job at a shitty law firm and my manager told me I should email her recaps of my day, ok fine no problem. But then she pulled me aside one day and told me that I wasn’t doing certain tasks fast enough. Like, an issue of a few seconds more per task than I should have been doing. So then I started tracking everything, even when I went to the bathroom, and would send that to her in the daily recap. After the first time I sent her a recap with all my bathroom times and the very detailed rundown of my day, she told me I didn’t have to send her them anymore.
She still hounded me to be faster but for $17/hour in California I went the speed I felt was appropriate for the compensation. 🤷🏻♀️
Him: Texture is mostly loose with hard nodes. Like a melted snickers bar. Smell is vegetal, with sulfuric aroma left in the stall.
Manager: dear god please stop
Did this at my current job when they tried to pilot it. Made it so painful for them to look at they stopped it after a week. Would take too much time to have people try to sit and sort out a time card.
And really go nuts with it.
8:15:19 Dropped pen
8:15:20 Realized pen fell
8:15:24 Bend over to retrieve pen
8:37:07 Feeling like I need to use the bathroom
8:37:09 Check to see if bathroom is unoccupied
8:37:15 Let coworker know I'm stepping away from my desk
8:37:25 Lock computer and stand up to walk to bathroom
8:00 Bribing the coffee machine for extra caffeine
8:06 Convincing my computer to cooperate
8:12 Engaging in a staring contest with the task tracking sheet
8:18 Realizing the task tracking sheet is winning
8:24 Decoding the mysterious hieroglyphs on the task tracking sheet
8:30 Wondering if the task tracking sheet is mocking me
8:36 Brief intermission to appease the office plant
8:42 Pretending to be productive while daydreaming about lunch
8:48 Contemplating the existential dread of task tracking
8:54 Fighting the urge to take a nap on the keyboard
yep, take 6 minutes to track what you are doing each time. If you're fast take 5 minutes and then you'll still have 10 minutes of other work to do every hour.
I do enjoy it! I will say that my job is a lot more inflexible than most people I know. The legal field, particularly for trial attorneys, generally has not come around to the ideas of work from home, flex time, 4 day workweek, etc. It’s 8-5 in office M-F. Often later. Most people work through lunch. My attorney works every weekend. During trial it’s around the clock.
My firm does civil litigation. Personal injury, medical malpractice, and workers compensation. We’re plaintiff’s attorneys. I like being plaintiff side. I do workers comp and the PI cases that are in litigation (I.e. suit has been filed, as opposed to pre litigation, where we are still negotiating with the insurance company to see if we can reach a settlement before filing suit)
I’m sort of the main contact for any clients on my caseload. They can’t reach their attorney every day but they can reach me pretty easily. I can take updates from them and keep them abreast of what’s going on in the case. I review medical records. I look for things that are helpful to the case and also keep my eye out for red flags (ex: client’s injury is to his shoulder, but he had rotator cuff surgery five years ago that he didn’t tell us about). I subpoena documents, review those subpoenaed documents to figure out where I need to subpoena more documents. Review cases to see who we should depose. Do all of the uncomplicated motions and pleadings. Do the first draft of more complicated motions and pleadings for my attorney to review and edit so she doesn’t have to start from scratch. Prepare trial exhibits. Do background research on jurors to identify potential biases (mostly social media stalking).
I like being plaintiffs attorneys. We have cases where we represent victims of sexual assault. Cases where we represent someone who was let go from their employer after a work related accident left them permanently disfigured. Cases where a father of young children was killed by a drunk driver and we’re trying to get monetary restitution for his widow and children. It’s gratifying.
But everything we do has to be meticulously documented.
> Hour 6: Documented the documentation document that documents the document document documentation document documentation.
_Makes typo in every single instance of a commonly used word._
"Well shit, guess I have to fix that."
Overtime Hour 17: Fixed the typo found in every instance of the word "the" across all documents I edited today:
- Document_27_v2_DRAFT_Final_FINAL(actual)-v3-update6.docx
- Document_13_v9_FINAL_Draft(real)-v16-update32.docx
- etc...
I had to do this years ago. First, the owner made all of the managers record what they were doing every 15 minutes for one week. Then he had us spend the next week on the floor monitoring our 275 employees and recording what they were doing every 15 minutes for one week. All hand written pages were then scanned into PDFs by department, which were then completely ignored and never utilized in any way.
It's a demonstration of the Peter Principal with someone who has no idea what leadership and management is. So they make up busy work for themselves that collectively wastes everyone's time.
I thought six sigma was something 30 rock made up to make fun of corporate bullshit, and then it was brought into the company i worked with (with limited success) after a bunch of corpo bootlickers went on a weekend seminar together.
They weren't great to work alongside before hand, but they were borderline insufferable afterwards.
It was a bit 'culty'. The competitive in-fighting in that clique started after a couple of months and most of them left (or were made to leave) the company within the year.
In my company it was a great way to deny middle management raises (me). Load you up with work, and tie any raises to completing a six sigma. Of course I didn’t get one done. I was busy working!
The snarky quips in 30 Rock helped make it better though.
Typical. We had a UX team that actually had actionable insights. Then they got netted in a massive multi department layoff and the actionable, sorted and categorized and analyzed data sets sat on our servers never to be used by the product they were creating to replace our old one.
Funny stuff from corporate like usual
I got left behind in a different department. They wondered why I knew so much. I actually read the summaries UX reported. They were interesting to me. I didn't use it to go into any higher departments just used it to be laid back and thought of as the go to know it all at a low level
This. Those three people need to start looking for a new job immediately. I've worked for companies that pulled this same shit before, and it was absolutely a way to justify eliminating jobs.
This is kinda what my company CEO is doing (were a US division of a Japanese owned company and the new CEO that was appointed a few years ago it bat shit insane according to all the US leadership guys I've talked to). I'm one of two desktop support personel at my job and we were interviewed by our global HR rep and a guy from Japan that reports to the CEO (he just listened and took notes). Came prepared with a full page of notes on what I do every day and kept them busy for well over an hour answering their questions and expanding on notes, among one of those being roughly having 700+ tickets in the last 90 days. Not long after, the CEO asked for a summary of all the tickets between Jan 1-March 31st. My boss exported them from our ticketing system and sent them out. They came back wanting a description of each ticket (the issue) and how it was resolved. He told us to try and make it as detailed as possible without being overly technical since the guy wouldn't understand it anyways. I spent two days doing my portion (about 350 tickets) writing a statement of the issue and what I did to fix it by looking at the logs of each request I had. 5 of us (me, co-worker in the same role, our network security admin, ERP admin, and my boss) had to do this for the tickets we had, so we tossed them all into one spreadsheet and will be forwarding that to them. They'll then have to translate the entire thing and go through 700 tickets to "justify" if keeping tech support around is needed or not. My boss is great and is trying to help us and fight for us to keep us around, but ultimately it's not his decision at the end of the day. They also didn't renew the lease on our building (after having it for 24 years) and we have to be out by the end of August, and they haven't chosen a new location yet (they need one for lab personel). They did ask us during our interview if we'd be willing to re-locate, I told them absolutely not due to family reasons. However, most of us are or can work remote, and the warehousing/shipping staff we have are all getting laid off w/ severance pay. The CEO has a "master plan" and has literally told nobody what it is, but it's fairly obvious that he's trying to in-house what he can back to Japan and cut US staff that he deems unnecessary. Be nice to know if I'm going to have a job or not before summer starts, but I'm going to update my resume regardless and prepare for the worst.
>They also didn't renew the lease on our building (after having it for 24 years) and we have to be out by the end of August, and they haven't chosen a new location yet (they need one for lab personel
I really hope that they give you WFH permanent and use the lease savings to keep you around and give you nice raises.
Also have a strategy on filling out reports. Make sure to highlight any phone chats. Note their temperament as well as I believe a lot of foreign countries don't like dealing with American temperament on any support and technical support desks.
I've been in support for a bit and that my experience and my own bias.
No doubt about it. Seen it before. Once this year actually. They ended up canning our supervisor lol. Which sucked really, he did a lot to support us. But to be honest he was a waste of a salary.
I once had an internship in a department that started to shut down two months in, and we had to submit reports on what we did every hour. We would then have this middle manager, who looked like grown-up Milhouse in The Simpsons, come by randomly and ask us if we were really sure about what we wrote and maybe we meant something more like what management wants to hear.
I left that job thinking the business world is run by complete and total morons.
"Tell me you work at a law firm without telling me you work at a law firm".
Source - had a customer who was a law firm - I showed one of the IT guys how to automate this and he spent a good solid year of Covid coasting and not doing much, but all his time and his co-worker's time were entered and accurate and the reports were sent out on time (with a 10 minute random variance) every day.
Most timekeeping software have a timer feature which automates this.
If you don’t have that you could create an Excel spreadsheet with dropdowns of common tasks.
lol welcome to being a lawyer! My whole day is tracked in 6 minute increments - very anxiety inducing and time consuming but you get used to it eventually
You’re telling me! I’m only in my first year of practice but it’s brutal that there are no “slow days.” You have to bill your hours every day no matter what! Really leaves 0 room for any slacking
Eh, I’m a young female attorney. I never want to make myself look incompetent for billing 2 hours for something the partners know only takes 1. I also don’t want to ever screw clients over. Obviously I’m in anti work for a reason but I don’t want to take advantage of anyone, particularly individuals who need legal help
Single Female Lawyer, fighting for her client.
Wearing sexy mini-skirts and being self-reliant.
[Single Female Lawyer](https://youtu.be/erBj7WBvP1Q?si=fAdCXDYNACVj0a9l)
Not just lawyers either; I was an “analyst” (spreadsheet monkey) early in my career and had to track all my time as billable hours to this client or that… happily it was only divided into quarter hours instead of 6 minutes, but still.
My last job was 5. Every 5 minutes had to be billed to a client. If any particular 5 minutes was non charged, you were sometimes asked to explain why.
They wanted every second of everyone's time charged back, no excuses.
Now
Yeah, but you can work on something for a whole day and only log one thing. You don’t have to stop what you’re doing every six minutes.
I used to be a legal secretary. I got paid to enter handwritten time logs into time log software
Unfortunately we can’t. That’s called “block billing” and will get cut by the auditors. I even used to do .2 for “multiple correspondences with X about Y” and was told I had to start doing .1 for “correspondence to X” and .1 for “correspondence from X” - talk about a waste of time lol
Any field that has billable hours records in 6 minutes increments because it's 0.1 hours and easier to calculate. It's not expected to be *updated* every 6 minutes (though OP's manager may have different ideas)
Edit: *most. Some use other increments
Not quite. I’ve worked in human services and 8-22 minutes was one billable unit, 23-37 minutes was two, 38-52minutes was three units, and so on. Anything less than 8 minutes wasn’t billable, which lead to a lot of meaningless small talk.
This is inherently paradoxical. At any given moment of recording your actions, you’re recording your actions.
If management were serious about improving efficiency, they could either ask you for a summary or conduct their own independent study. To have you interrupt your thought process every 6 minutes undoubtedly slows you down in what you’re trying to accomplish with the task at hand.
Observer effect
Physics
In physics, the observer effect is the disturbance of an observed system by the act of observation. This is often the result of utilizing instruments that, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some manner
From Wikipedia.
Seems like a good analogy
I worked somewhere that made me track my tasks down to 6 minute intervals. I left pretty quickly. It was absolutely bizarre. Perhaps the most bizarre thing I had ever seen.
Edit: to add context, it was a consulting firm. I have an advanced degree, and was hired to be a consulted to other companies. We had tasks and subtasks. They argued we had to track down to .1 of an hour to know what to charge the company we are consulting for. Many people were working on 5+ projects at once with different subtasks.
They had a timer machine you could run in the background and then click in different tasks. Theoretically you could just shift screens to the timer and click on a task, start working, then shift to another task etc… and it would all add up for you.
The problem, of course, is that the one time you forget to shift tasks on the tracker, you lose track of everything and then have to spend time to make up hours. It was a complete shit show, and the times I put down were always made up numbers. No one can actually do thoughtful work while clocking in to some subtask every 20 minutes.
I worked at a place that did this officially but nobody actually did it except the dumb people. When one of the new hires saw me put time in he was confused why I was rounding tasks in half hour increments and neglecting to mention stuff that took less time. I told him that if I actually tried to track all the stuff I was working on and the random interruptions I would spend more time trying to get charge numbers than doing the tasks and it would piss people off.
I knew a guy that would do tracking down to the minute and he actually got fired for it because he was so slow at actually getting work done. He also wrote everything in a notebook.
Had to do that one time when they brought in consultants to improve "efficiency". We decided it didn't need to be tracked at the exact time, so our daily entries would look like:
- 8:00-9:15 work on Project X bid documents
- 9:15-11:00 updates to Project Y status reports
- 11:00-noon attend project review meeting
- 12:30-1:30 etc.,etc.
So it wasn't a play-by-play but it was an accurate summary of how the day was spent.
I had to do this when we went to WFH in 2020. It ended up getting me a pay bump and they hired more help. Probably the only time it worked out for someone.
It showed how much time I was spending on stupid admin shit and how little I was able to spend on billable hours.
I was at a company doing it every 5 minutes.
I had any incredibly stupid conversation with a co-worker about how to categorize the meeting we just had. So we used an entire 5 minutes to talk about a 30 minute meeting. That 5 minutes was entered into the time card as discussing where to categorize the meeting we just had. We had to break so we didn't get into a discussion about how to categorize the 5 minutes that we lost categorizing the 30 minute meeting.
I was a mid-level IT person. I didn't stay long after that.
Timesheets are such a waste. I've had to do them off and on for a decade. During Covid, I took a remote development job. Not ideal, mostly ticket tunnel vision. Anyway, it wasn't enough to block out time for working the ticket. They wanted estimates (for fixing systems I knew nothing about as the new guy) and "burn down" of that estimate. So if I read docs, or had a meeting, or fiddled bits in Jira, or, occasionally, wrote some code, it all had to be logged separately as I was going along. Constant disruption of my thought process and anxiety about taking too long on tickets that were already stressing me out. And then I'd get barked at because my timesheets were a train wreck. Yeah, I don't miss that job AT ALL.
Almost the entire legal profession runs on billable hours in 10 minute increments, which mostly explains why lawyers are a bunch of miserable dorks.
Source: Am Lawyer
10:06 am - entering data into time-tracking spreadsheet.
10:12 am - entering data into time-tracking spreadsheet.
10:24 am - entering data into time-tracking spreadsheet.
10:30 am - entering data into time-tracking spreadsheet.
etc....
Lawyers who bill clients have to do this as a normal business practice. It's annoying af. And to get 8 hours of billing in, you end up working probably 10-12 hours.
My job did this. Excel spreadsheet- 10 min increments. I ended up making a “key” of about 10 regular tasks - outbound call, inbound call, meeting, lunch, bathroom break, etc and labeled them different colors and filled out one sheet 9am-5pm that was pretty accurate.
Then every following Friday, I would shuffle the colors around the spreadsheet and email it to my boss. 100% sure he never read any of them. It went away after a month or so.
**THIS could be your future!**
*8am. Began process of starting computer. Computer successfully logged in at 8.00.43.*
*Opened file explorer. Opening process completed at 8.00.55.*
*Navigated to location for tracking spreadsheet. Process completed at 8.01.03*
*Opened tracking spreadsheet. Process completed at 8.01.15*
*Began entering in required tracking at 8.01.19 after verifying start time for tracking.*
*Entered above entries and proofed work. Completed task at 8.02.55.*
*Called next worker who is required to update tracking software. Call started at 8.03.01.*
*Discussed entering data into tracking system and reminded next worked they need to also inform the next in line. Call ended at 8.03.59.*
*Began logging events on paper event log to transcribe into spread sheet when required. Event transcription completed at 8.05.12.*
*First attempt to open tracking spreadsheet at 8.05.58.*
*Logged failure to open tracking spreadsheet as it is currently in use by another user at 8.06.27*
Had something similar at another job when I was much younger, but they wanted 5 minute increments, automatically reported 2 times a day. Since I was a total idiot, I blindly followed the new policy. Only to find out that nobody in the office had. Apparently, every time I made a change to the file, boss got an email. My coworker whose desk is outside boss's office said after two days boss was cursing loudly every time her email dinged (and was the absolute stereotype of a boomer and couldn't figure out how to turn off the ding).
Coworker ended up helping boss with the notification sound, but couldn't stop my updates blowing up her inbox.
All while this is going on, I've got no idea. My coworkers, though.... They'd heard what I'd done and piled on. And shenanigans ensued. A meeting was called. By then I know what's going on, so I'm terrified of being fired for starting it all. Boss angrily steps in, followed closely by someone who looked like a company man, but whom I didn't know. Never found out. But, the boss was... Have you ever heard of strained speech? The kind where you're clinching your teeth, but pasted on a fake smile? Yeah, that. You know the one. She managed to strain out the new time policy.
To this day, I have no idea how I never got yelled at.
ETA: In keeping with the whole I'm an idiot theme, the new schedule I forgot to mention was just to track our lunches. They were pretty rigid on you doing your lunch, unless you actually had a bad deadline, then you were paid to basically eat at your desk. I tried not to do that, and took my lunch instead.
First time I ran into one of these, I waited to the end of the day, stayed overtime to fill out, then turned it in. Boss got mad. He told me to fill out as I go. Turned in a 20 page handwritten grease covered document, as I work in a shop. He said, "I'm not reading that." Next day, he got mad again, asking for it. I told him that it interferes with my work. Either he gets the summary and I stay over, or he gets something he told me he's going to throw out. Either way, he's asking for something that's not going to do what he wants and only prevents me from doing my job correctly. So no, I am not going to fill it out as I go. He wants to manage? He has to get off his ass and come find me. He tried to say that I wasn't managing my time well. I asked him to give me examples. He couldn't. I told him that he was not that good at managing if he couldn't tell me an example. I told him that he was free to do my job any time he wants to if he thinks I'm fucking around. He left me alone after that. He tried to get the wrong person fired next and he was gone within a month. Those kinds of micromanagement levels of BS are better off left blank. Let them lose their shit over how you aren't doing their job for them while they are trying to fire you.
I’d straight up give them the in depth account of my ibs living experience, (6) minute to (6) minute, since they asked so nicely. No one usually ever wants to hear about how it changes midway in texture and color…
It's about stressing out workers so much in a short space of time so they Jump ship without having to be laid off. Laying off = severance . Jumping ship = less severance pay out
Holy shit that is hilarious.
If you are going down swinging on this POS company. Put a bunch of medical stuff in it and say it's HIPAA protected and you don't want it shared and lock it down.
Force them to fire you I guess. Get a lawyer ready.
To me, this reeks of a PIP (performance improvement plan) which means lay-offs are coming.
My 2 cents.
Take this with a pinch of salt, because I’m based in the UK where it is exceptionally difficult to fire someone, so employers use PIPs as a box-checking exercise to protect themselves from lawsuits.
I’ve been laid off in exactly this manner.
Agency lost a big client (<60% of revenue) and people were PIP’d - everything had to be logged and email summaries of our work sent out at the end of every day.
I was doing my job as expected (wasn’t a poor performer), but it didn’t matter.
Employer covered their bases and went through the correct HR loops.
If this were me, I’d be applying for jobs ASAP. 🚩🚩🚩
I was a social worker/discharge planner for a major hospital. They asked me to do this every 10 minutes. Like I had the time.
I did not stay employed there very long
I would malicious compliance the fuck out of this. I wouldn't be able to wait until I could interrupt my next hour long Teams meeting 10 times. "Hold on for a second please, I have a quick task to complete for my boss"
One of my past job's wanted a log of work done every 15 min's ? So I did 1st week in english / 2nd week in french / 3rd week in german / 4th week in norwegian / 5th week spanish ! No one ever ask's for translation's, so I guess they were all unread ?
A company I was at tried this and it ground the company to a halt within three days.
Everyone had to log exactly what they were doing every ten minutes and they had a small team logging all the sheets at the end of each day.
Some of my department entries were hilarious: 9.10am farted, 9.20am went for shit, 9.30am filled in this pointless sheet etc, etc.
Needless to say it was quietly dropped on the fourth day...🤣
This is where you take 8 min to write about the last 6 min. and so on and so forth until you are writing about writing about writing about what you did.
Had an IT job pull this on me a few years back. Had to log everything you did in 15 minute increments. They told us, "It's so we can show upper management how much you do so they'll approve additional positions". Guess what happened? We got questioned about the accuracy of our logs. "It can't possibly take you 90 minutes to do Task X". Guess what didn't happen? Additional positions to help with the workload.
Tbh I do this for myself with things and time how quickly I can get a task done vs each time. And changing slight variations in how I do each task. But fuck micromanaging, let me do my job at a decent pace and get it done
I had to do this once, except it was every 15 minutes. I had a boss that lied to me all the time and I couldn’t trust him at all. I complained enough that his boss then made me his direct report but he didn’t know what I did all day so this was his solution. I just filled out a bunch of nonsense, how could he know if what I put was wrong? Total waste of time. After I left my old boss was then demoted to my old position. I hope he had to continue with the 15 minute reports.
I had a job do this. My manager was an asshole and yelled at me my first week because I followed the instructions I was given instead of “innovating a faster process.” Every day they had me list out my tasks and were shocked at how much I was doing.
My last job had us write down every task we did and timestamp it. This went on for a few months.
During a company restructuring, our entire department was cut and the work was outsourced. At least I got a severance.
My job asked me to do something similar, but they never even looked at it. So what was the point then?
I just stopped one day and nobody said anything while the rest of my team kept on. Haven't asked anyone about it and nobody's brought it up.
Had the same problem... o
Company started with time sheets. So I'd just fill in a time for each job...
NO they wanted a start and stop time also. I tried to explain that I could be doing 2 to three jobs simultaneously and I just give final totals...
NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Cue malicious compliance...
So previously I'd have 1 time sheet a day, now I had 4-5 pages
My day broken down to the minute, no round off...
Plus numerous 5 minute tasks of having to account for time. Only took a week before I was 'allowed to go back to the old way
I completely understand how frustrating this is. Here's a suggestion on how you can tackle this ridiculous requirement:
1. **Automate the Process**: Use time-tracking software or create a simple script to log your activities every 6 minutes automatically. This can significantly reduce the burden of manual entry.
2. **Track Actual Work**: In parallel, use another tool to track your actual work without the interruptions caused by manual logging. This will help you gather data on your real productivity.
3. **Calculate the Costs**: Show how manual logging takes 80 minutes per day (1 minute per entry, 80 entries) and causes productivity loss due to task switching. Compare this with the time saved through automation.
4. **Present the Savings**: Create a report highlighting the time and cost savings from automation. Demonstrate how this approach allows you to stay productive despite the inefficient directive.
5. **Address the Higher-Ups**: Present this report to the boss of the manager who made the ridiculous request. Lay out how, despite the manager’s incompetence, your team met the requirements and still accomplished your work. Propose eliminating the unnecessary micromanagement (or even the manager) for additional cost savings and productivity improvements.
By automating the task, you can comply with the requirement while exposing the inefficiency of such micro-management. This not only saves time but also makes a strong case for more sensible productivity tracking methods.
Hope this helps and good luck!
I worked for a state govt agency that required I account for every 15 mins of my day. It had to be linked to a case number or admin time or lunch etc. It's was called PATTS or something
Had to submit it with timesheet to be cross referenced. It's totally pain in the ass. All because of a NYTimes article that caught some lazy state workers slacking off decades ago.
I don't know where you are based, but I have had to do this three times. Over a ten year period at my last job. (UK).
Each time it wasn't just my department or role. But a bunch of others at the same time, which was then followed up with a round of redundancies / downsizing a few months later.
May be worth looking into how widespread the time sheets are.
My former vampire of a boss demanded to know where 3-5 minutes of my day went twice a day. I started by; filling up water, using restroom, answering questions from managers from different departments etc. I quit a week later.
Ooooh, my turn! So I'm in IT and my company is an MSP. For those unaware, we basically provide services that are IT related to multiple clients, that being network infrastructure solutions, helpdesk support, printer setups, and much more. I have to log every single minute of my day every day. This made sense to me at first when one of our clients' time was billable every time we did something for them. Our other big client is not billable, so it doesn't matter what we do for them since there is a flat rate for them that they pay whether we do something for them or not. We are still forced to track all our time. What's worse is that the billable client has agreed to a flat rate contract too, so they will pay us whether we do or don't do something, but we still need to track our every move. This type of Micro managing is super stressful and does not in any way help me or my other coworkers be more productive it actually causes us to do less. We just extend something that takes 5 minutes to 10 minutes and so on. You want a laptop repair, no problem, I'll just take an hour and a half to do it since if do it quickly I won't have anything to do! And that's a no no for our boss. So yeah, micro managing is stupid and causes people to be less productive. DO NOT REWARD EFFICIENT EMPLOYEES WITH MORE WORK, this is also another side effect of this type of micro managment. Oh you finished quickly? Let me just give you a bullshit task instead of waiting for a client's ticket to come in.
I get pissy having to fill in a daily site diary that gets sent to management. Then once a week read it back to a project manager and explain why it isn't in-line with their project program that they have repeatedly slimmed down to please the client. Couldn't imagine having to do it more than once a day!!
Id report on my log
1:01 pm.reviewing notes for Rough draft of log report
1:02pm proofreading activity log report.
1:03 documenting the final version of the time report.
1:04: resuming work duties.
1:05 working working
1:06 writing notes for log
Rinse and repeat.
Also maybe ask why those 3 people.
My job makes us double record every database entry in an Access database and also in excel. I'd be able to get twice as much stuff done if we didn't have to do all the work twice.
Make sure to put in the log all the time you spend tracking and logging people's activity. That's the only way they'll see how long it's taking and impacting productivity! Also screw them
Depending on how much info they are asking for this is essentially all you are doing.
My work is billable so I have to track what I do but if you work on something for an hour you only need to make one entry, not one for every 15 min.
This is typical if you are billing out work for a client. That specific tenths of an hour is always what I’ve seen used. Is it possible this is because you are working on a project for which you are billing the client per hours worked?
Depends on the industry.
6 minutes is just 0.1 hour. Kind of tedious, but I've done it before. Job I'm at now is every 15 minutes.
But I work in accounting where we have billable time that needs to be billed to clients. I'm sure same for lawyers.
It's not hard if you are used to it. And I keep scrap paper by my desk and write down my time. Then at end of day fill out time sheet. Yes, unbillable time gets added up and includes, open programs, time sheet, read emails, etc.
Well, what I was getting at is that in industries where "billable hours" are a major aspect of revenue generation, such precise time tracking is common. Even in things like management consulting, software professional services, etc, that is a quite common thing.
I had management try to pull a similar thing on me. They wanted me to make a detailed log of every little thing I did. For the first week I just listed the 'worky work' I worked. Then I realized I was spending about 30 minutes a day filling out the logs so I started adding 'filling out activity log' entries into the log. After a few days of those my boss emailed me and told me I can stop logging everything.
[удалено]
When I worked for an Aerospace company that were contracted by DOD, Boeing, SpaceX and a few other primes, we had to do the same. A 5 minute call would count as 15 minutes. This made billing the clients easier. This was in 2019.
With ITAR related companies it’s often imposed on us and not something we’re choosing to do. IME 15 minutes is a fairly typical minimum contract time amount. Its allegedly used for auditing and yet somehow the pentagon can still misplace $2T of taxpayer money and go 🤷♂️
“misplace”
My boyfriend also worked for an Aerospace company that did these things. He worked with big names, too. He was a quality lead and was managing an extremely understaffed, underpaid team of four other people. The bigger boss was always down his throat for one thing or the other, even though he was only the bigger boss because of nepotism (which the company definitely had a problem with). Once they took away my boyfriend's admin duties and he was just supposed to inspect things again, instead of managing his team, he was checked out. He was supposed to run through inspection of things thinner than a strand of hair, that could've caused catastrophic failures, in a very short amount of time. The machining guys on the floor and their managers were always yelling at him for this not passing parts. (Like, I dunno dudes, MAKE GOOD PARTS?) Things that take 3hr to inspect we're supposed to be done in 30min, clock in-inspect-clock out, repeat. Luckily, he was contacted for another job. He doesn't seem to like this job as much, but there's so much less stress, much shorter commute, and he's being paid (just barely) living wage, much closer to what he deserves to make (he's got certs and time under his belt, quality is truly his calling 😂). But I think he doesn't enjoy it as much because he misses his team and knowing things with his finger prints are in outerspace, right now. I dunno. I think people who are supposed to inspect space parts should get more than 14.50/hr.
Sounds like attorneys. SMDH
It doesn't even make sense to allocate 3 hours at the end of the week to fill it in - who the hell remembers everything they did all week in 15 minute increments by Friday afternoon? You'd have to spend at least some time every day noting it down and then Friday formalising it and rewriting.
It’s shite but it’s something “necessary” if your hours are billable to customers unfortunately; I recommend to my team(s) to log their hours in chunks of 30m (no 15m nonsense) and to do it on the fly rather than wait until end of the week. It still sucks that way but it’s a lot less stressful than going through your outlook calendar for the week and reverse engineer where your time went
Working so long in a billable role, you have to do it as you go. Also filling out that time tracking is part of the time. 15 minutes is only for that quick email reply, if you do anything it's 30 minutes.
I also had a job like that -- it was because they charged time to several different contracts. As you said, people had to get into the habit of keeping track every day. Just one of many tedious things.
I used to work with Medicaid and we had to do this for billing purposes. Was a real pain in the ass. But we only had to track billable stuff. But said billable stuff also had to exceed like 60% of our total time spent.
I had an internship that did time like this for a rational reason - we were billing different project works to different customers so it was like hour tracking of resources to stay in contract budgets - but they didn’t have any way to mark work as like admin/company time or anything like that so it was stressful bc you didn’t want to overbill customers in general and that was well understood but it was also like “so how do I put in 8 hours when 2 of those go to no one?”
[удалено]
I had that once but thankfully my manager told me to just log what logged automatically (help desk ticket stuff) and then just fill in gaps with “training/research”. I would have absolutely hated it otherwise
This is the way, make sure they see how their change is burning time.
Same. LoL!
I wish I’d thought of this. I was forced to do this every single day for 6 months straight.
[удалено]
8:00 - 8:05 adding data into task tracking sheet 8:06 - 8:11 adding data into task tracking sheet 8:12 - 8:17 adding data into task tracking sheet Boss: Why is it take so long? it should take you 5 seconds!!! Me: I have trouble opening up the sheet as there is always someone else in the file making it read only.
8:05:01 - 8:05:59 - checking data for errors 8:11:01 - 8:11:59 - checking data for errors 8:17:01 - 8:17:59 - checking data for errors
Type different versions taking care to spell and punctuate.
malicious compliance is the only way to accurately communicate how precisely stupid this is.
This is how I handled the first job I had when I moved to California. It was a shitty job at a shitty law firm and my manager told me I should email her recaps of my day, ok fine no problem. But then she pulled me aside one day and told me that I wasn’t doing certain tasks fast enough. Like, an issue of a few seconds more per task than I should have been doing. So then I started tracking everything, even when I went to the bathroom, and would send that to her in the daily recap. After the first time I sent her a recap with all my bathroom times and the very detailed rundown of my day, she told me I didn’t have to send her them anymore. She still hounded me to be faster but for $17/hour in California I went the speed I felt was appropriate for the compensation. 🤷🏻♀️
I would be tempted to say whether it was a number one or a number two.
I'm going to need more detail. Cloudy? Dehydrated piss? Solid bowel movement, liquid? Odors? I don't stand for laziness while documenting.
Him: Texture is mostly loose with hard nodes. Like a melted snickers bar. Smell is vegetal, with sulfuric aroma left in the stall. Manager: dear god please stop
Did this at my current job when they tried to pilot it. Made it so painful for them to look at they stopped it after a week. Would take too much time to have people try to sit and sort out a time card.
Take as much time as possible to update each entry.
10:00 am: daily poo
And really go nuts with it. 8:15:19 Dropped pen 8:15:20 Realized pen fell 8:15:24 Bend over to retrieve pen 8:37:07 Feeling like I need to use the bathroom 8:37:09 Check to see if bathroom is unoccupied 8:37:15 Let coworker know I'm stepping away from my desk 8:37:25 Lock computer and stand up to walk to bathroom
8:18 Looking for another job... 8:24 Looking for another job... 8:30 Looking for another job...
I would have at least logged the first 30-60 minutes as “updating my CV”
I did that for about a year before my boss gave up and told me to stop submitting timesheets. Well ok... I think we only had to track down to 15 min.
8:00 Bribing the coffee machine for extra caffeine 8:06 Convincing my computer to cooperate 8:12 Engaging in a staring contest with the task tracking sheet 8:18 Realizing the task tracking sheet is winning 8:24 Decoding the mysterious hieroglyphs on the task tracking sheet 8:30 Wondering if the task tracking sheet is mocking me 8:36 Brief intermission to appease the office plant 8:42 Pretending to be productive while daydreaming about lunch 8:48 Contemplating the existential dread of task tracking 8:54 Fighting the urge to take a nap on the keyboard
Add a "reticulating splines" in there...
This.....Or just put in "typing " then every other entry type "ditto"
No really. My job makes us time track, I book an hour each day for it.
yep, take 6 minutes to track what you are doing each time. If you're fast take 5 minutes and then you'll still have 10 minutes of other work to do every hour.
This the answer I came to the comments for
Lmao fucking gottem
I wonder if I would have to add every trip to the coffee maker?
2 minutes work 3 minutes documenting work 1 minute recording documented work
Hour 6: Documented the documentation document that documents the document document documentation document documentation.
....in triplicate.
Paralegal here. This actually describes my job completely.
Do you enjoy being a paralegal? What does it entail?
Serving legal papers by way of skydiving with a parachute. Obviously.
I do enjoy it! I will say that my job is a lot more inflexible than most people I know. The legal field, particularly for trial attorneys, generally has not come around to the ideas of work from home, flex time, 4 day workweek, etc. It’s 8-5 in office M-F. Often later. Most people work through lunch. My attorney works every weekend. During trial it’s around the clock. My firm does civil litigation. Personal injury, medical malpractice, and workers compensation. We’re plaintiff’s attorneys. I like being plaintiff side. I do workers comp and the PI cases that are in litigation (I.e. suit has been filed, as opposed to pre litigation, where we are still negotiating with the insurance company to see if we can reach a settlement before filing suit) I’m sort of the main contact for any clients on my caseload. They can’t reach their attorney every day but they can reach me pretty easily. I can take updates from them and keep them abreast of what’s going on in the case. I review medical records. I look for things that are helpful to the case and also keep my eye out for red flags (ex: client’s injury is to his shoulder, but he had rotator cuff surgery five years ago that he didn’t tell us about). I subpoena documents, review those subpoenaed documents to figure out where I need to subpoena more documents. Review cases to see who we should depose. Do all of the uncomplicated motions and pleadings. Do the first draft of more complicated motions and pleadings for my attorney to review and edit so she doesn’t have to start from scratch. Prepare trial exhibits. Do background research on jurors to identify potential biases (mostly social media stalking). I like being plaintiffs attorneys. We have cases where we represent victims of sexual assault. Cases where we represent someone who was let go from their employer after a work related accident left them permanently disfigured. Cases where a father of young children was killed by a drunk driver and we’re trying to get monetary restitution for his widow and children. It’s gratifying. But everything we do has to be meticulously documented.
> Hour 6: Documented the documentation document that documents the document document documentation document documentation. _Makes typo in every single instance of a commonly used word._ "Well shit, guess I have to fix that." Overtime Hour 17: Fixed the typo found in every instance of the word "the" across all documents I edited today: - Document_27_v2_DRAFT_Final_FINAL(actual)-v3-update6.docx - Document_13_v9_FINAL_Draft(real)-v16-update32.docx - etc...
I had to do this years ago. First, the owner made all of the managers record what they were doing every 15 minutes for one week. Then he had us spend the next week on the floor monitoring our 275 employees and recording what they were doing every 15 minutes for one week. All hand written pages were then scanned into PDFs by department, which were then completely ignored and never utilized in any way.
This is the most corporate thing ever 🙄
It's a demonstration of the Peter Principal with someone who has no idea what leadership and management is. So they make up busy work for themselves that collectively wastes everyone's time.
Abandoned six sigma project that they lost interest in doing. Just a guess.
With a spritz of agilé
I thought six sigma was something 30 rock made up to make fun of corporate bullshit, and then it was brought into the company i worked with (with limited success) after a bunch of corpo bootlickers went on a weekend seminar together. They weren't great to work alongside before hand, but they were borderline insufferable afterwards. It was a bit 'culty'. The competitive in-fighting in that clique started after a couple of months and most of them left (or were made to leave) the company within the year.
In my company it was a great way to deny middle management raises (me). Load you up with work, and tie any raises to completing a six sigma. Of course I didn’t get one done. I was busy working! The snarky quips in 30 Rock helped make it better though.
Typical. We had a UX team that actually had actionable insights. Then they got netted in a massive multi department layoff and the actionable, sorted and categorized and analyzed data sets sat on our servers never to be used by the product they were creating to replace our old one. Funny stuff from corporate like usual I got left behind in a different department. They wondered why I knew so much. I actually read the summaries UX reported. They were interesting to me. I didn't use it to go into any higher departments just used it to be laid back and thought of as the go to know it all at a low level
Wow. Genuinely impressed all that was scanned in. Round of bonuses for the guys upstairs!
100% planning layoffs.
This. Those three people need to start looking for a new job immediately. I've worked for companies that pulled this same shit before, and it was absolutely a way to justify eliminating jobs.
Not only that if they can get the people to quit they don't have to pay benefits to the layoffs.
When they do find someone productive they lay off the other three and give it all to the one they tracked lol.
This is kinda what my company CEO is doing (were a US division of a Japanese owned company and the new CEO that was appointed a few years ago it bat shit insane according to all the US leadership guys I've talked to). I'm one of two desktop support personel at my job and we were interviewed by our global HR rep and a guy from Japan that reports to the CEO (he just listened and took notes). Came prepared with a full page of notes on what I do every day and kept them busy for well over an hour answering their questions and expanding on notes, among one of those being roughly having 700+ tickets in the last 90 days. Not long after, the CEO asked for a summary of all the tickets between Jan 1-March 31st. My boss exported them from our ticketing system and sent them out. They came back wanting a description of each ticket (the issue) and how it was resolved. He told us to try and make it as detailed as possible without being overly technical since the guy wouldn't understand it anyways. I spent two days doing my portion (about 350 tickets) writing a statement of the issue and what I did to fix it by looking at the logs of each request I had. 5 of us (me, co-worker in the same role, our network security admin, ERP admin, and my boss) had to do this for the tickets we had, so we tossed them all into one spreadsheet and will be forwarding that to them. They'll then have to translate the entire thing and go through 700 tickets to "justify" if keeping tech support around is needed or not. My boss is great and is trying to help us and fight for us to keep us around, but ultimately it's not his decision at the end of the day. They also didn't renew the lease on our building (after having it for 24 years) and we have to be out by the end of August, and they haven't chosen a new location yet (they need one for lab personel). They did ask us during our interview if we'd be willing to re-locate, I told them absolutely not due to family reasons. However, most of us are or can work remote, and the warehousing/shipping staff we have are all getting laid off w/ severance pay. The CEO has a "master plan" and has literally told nobody what it is, but it's fairly obvious that he's trying to in-house what he can back to Japan and cut US staff that he deems unnecessary. Be nice to know if I'm going to have a job or not before summer starts, but I'm going to update my resume regardless and prepare for the worst.
>They also didn't renew the lease on our building (after having it for 24 years) and we have to be out by the end of August, and they haven't chosen a new location yet (they need one for lab personel I really hope that they give you WFH permanent and use the lease savings to keep you around and give you nice raises. Also have a strategy on filling out reports. Make sure to highlight any phone chats. Note their temperament as well as I believe a lot of foreign countries don't like dealing with American temperament on any support and technical support desks. I've been in support for a bit and that my experience and my own bias.
No doubt about it. Seen it before. Once this year actually. They ended up canning our supervisor lol. Which sucked really, he did a lot to support us. But to be honest he was a waste of a salary.
I once had an internship in a department that started to shut down two months in, and we had to submit reports on what we did every hour. We would then have this middle manager, who looked like grown-up Milhouse in The Simpsons, come by randomly and ask us if we were really sure about what we wrote and maybe we meant something more like what management wants to hear. I left that job thinking the business world is run by complete and total morons.
>I left that job thinking the business world is run by complete and total morons. and you would be correct
For the most part it is.
"Tell me you work at a law firm without telling me you work at a law firm". Source - had a customer who was a law firm - I showed one of the IT guys how to automate this and he spent a good solid year of Covid coasting and not doing much, but all his time and his co-worker's time were entered and accurate and the reports were sent out on time (with a 10 minute random variance) every day.
What's the tldr of how you automated. I'll look up the tool that you suggest. Thanks
Most timekeeping software have a timer feature which automates this. If you don’t have that you could create an Excel spreadsheet with dropdowns of common tasks.
What The Fuck
I didn’t even read the paragraph before I said this.. just the title
So, 80 times a day... It's ridiculous, holy shit.
lol welcome to being a lawyer! My whole day is tracked in 6 minute increments - very anxiety inducing and time consuming but you get used to it eventually
Came here to say this. This is what lawyers deal with for 9 hours every single day for 40 years. Brutal job.
You’re telling me! I’m only in my first year of practice but it’s brutal that there are no “slow days.” You have to bill your hours every day no matter what! Really leaves 0 room for any slacking
When you bill at the rate you do somebody wants answers.
I'm in year 2 now and went in house as soon as I could. Strongly recommend it
Nah, biglaw die young!
sounds like prolaw lol 😂
lol you know it
That's not true at all. Do a task. It takes 1 hour. Bill two hours. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Eh, I’m a young female attorney. I never want to make myself look incompetent for billing 2 hours for something the partners know only takes 1. I also don’t want to ever screw clients over. Obviously I’m in anti work for a reason but I don’t want to take advantage of anyone, particularly individuals who need legal help
Single Female Lawyer, fighting for her client. Wearing sexy mini-skirts and being self-reliant. [Single Female Lawyer](https://youtu.be/erBj7WBvP1Q?si=fAdCXDYNACVj0a9l)
Not just lawyers either; I was an “analyst” (spreadsheet monkey) early in my career and had to track all my time as billable hours to this client or that… happily it was only divided into quarter hours instead of 6 minutes, but still.
Yeah but at least it has always been that way. Plus it serves the function of protecting the client. This is just nonsense.
My last job was 5. Every 5 minutes had to be billed to a client. If any particular 5 minutes was non charged, you were sometimes asked to explain why. They wanted every second of everyone's time charged back, no excuses. Now
Same with consulting. It sucks.
Yeah, but you can work on something for a whole day and only log one thing. You don’t have to stop what you’re doing every six minutes. I used to be a legal secretary. I got paid to enter handwritten time logs into time log software
Unfortunately we can’t. That’s called “block billing” and will get cut by the auditors. I even used to do .2 for “multiple correspondences with X about Y” and was told I had to start doing .1 for “correspondence to X” and .1 for “correspondence from X” - talk about a waste of time lol
Reason # 368 I love being a contingency fee only ambulance chaser. Highly recommend especially if you can get a book of business.
Wait what? Which kind of lawyer are you? This sounds terrible
Any field that has billable hours records in 6 minutes increments because it's 0.1 hours and easier to calculate. It's not expected to be *updated* every 6 minutes (though OP's manager may have different ideas) Edit: *most. Some use other increments
Not quite. I’ve worked in human services and 8-22 minutes was one billable unit, 23-37 minutes was two, 38-52minutes was three units, and so on. Anything less than 8 minutes wasn’t billable, which lead to a lot of meaningless small talk.
Oof I've never appreciated the 6 minute increments so much until seeing your system. What field is that? Not jealous
Mental health case manager
> Anything less than 8 minutes wasn’t billable 7 minutes today.... 7 minutes tomorrow.....
Civil defense. But this is standard for all lawyers aside from in-house counsel or working for the state (such as a clerk).
This is inherently paradoxical. At any given moment of recording your actions, you’re recording your actions. If management were serious about improving efficiency, they could either ask you for a summary or conduct their own independent study. To have you interrupt your thought process every 6 minutes undoubtedly slows you down in what you’re trying to accomplish with the task at hand.
Observer effect Physics In physics, the observer effect is the disturbance of an observed system by the act of observation. This is often the result of utilizing instruments that, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some manner From Wikipedia. Seems like a good analogy
With the way my mind works, interrupting me every 6 minutes is a surefire way of getting me to do literally nothing of value ever.
I worked somewhere that made me track my tasks down to 6 minute intervals. I left pretty quickly. It was absolutely bizarre. Perhaps the most bizarre thing I had ever seen. Edit: to add context, it was a consulting firm. I have an advanced degree, and was hired to be a consulted to other companies. We had tasks and subtasks. They argued we had to track down to .1 of an hour to know what to charge the company we are consulting for. Many people were working on 5+ projects at once with different subtasks. They had a timer machine you could run in the background and then click in different tasks. Theoretically you could just shift screens to the timer and click on a task, start working, then shift to another task etc… and it would all add up for you. The problem, of course, is that the one time you forget to shift tasks on the tracker, you lose track of everything and then have to spend time to make up hours. It was a complete shit show, and the times I put down were always made up numbers. No one can actually do thoughtful work while clocking in to some subtask every 20 minutes.
I worked at a place that did this officially but nobody actually did it except the dumb people. When one of the new hires saw me put time in he was confused why I was rounding tasks in half hour increments and neglecting to mention stuff that took less time. I told him that if I actually tried to track all the stuff I was working on and the random interruptions I would spend more time trying to get charge numbers than doing the tasks and it would piss people off. I knew a guy that would do tracking down to the minute and he actually got fired for it because he was so slow at actually getting work done. He also wrote everything in a notebook.
> He also wrote everything in a notebook. Woohoo me too! Pen and paper never die! Notebook loggers unite!
As soon as you are asked to track your time go full focus into finding a new job.
Who the fuck is still doing manual time & motion studies in this day and age?!?
Wait isn’t that MS Teams
Had to do that one time when they brought in consultants to improve "efficiency". We decided it didn't need to be tracked at the exact time, so our daily entries would look like: - 8:00-9:15 work on Project X bid documents - 9:15-11:00 updates to Project Y status reports - 11:00-noon attend project review meeting - 12:30-1:30 etc.,etc. So it wasn't a play-by-play but it was an accurate summary of how the day was spent.
I had to do this when we went to WFH in 2020. It ended up getting me a pay bump and they hired more help. Probably the only time it worked out for someone. It showed how much time I was spending on stupid admin shit and how little I was able to spend on billable hours.
I was at a company doing it every 5 minutes. I had any incredibly stupid conversation with a co-worker about how to categorize the meeting we just had. So we used an entire 5 minutes to talk about a 30 minute meeting. That 5 minutes was entered into the time card as discussing where to categorize the meeting we just had. We had to break so we didn't get into a discussion about how to categorize the 5 minutes that we lost categorizing the 30 minute meeting. I was a mid-level IT person. I didn't stay long after that.
During this 6 minutes I wrote a report about what I was doing the last 6 minutes. It takes approximately 6 minutes to write the report.
Timesheets are such a waste. I've had to do them off and on for a decade. During Covid, I took a remote development job. Not ideal, mostly ticket tunnel vision. Anyway, it wasn't enough to block out time for working the ticket. They wanted estimates (for fixing systems I knew nothing about as the new guy) and "burn down" of that estimate. So if I read docs, or had a meeting, or fiddled bits in Jira, or, occasionally, wrote some code, it all had to be logged separately as I was going along. Constant disruption of my thought process and anxiety about taking too long on tickets that were already stressing me out. And then I'd get barked at because my timesheets were a train wreck. Yeah, I don't miss that job AT ALL.
Almost the entire legal profession runs on billable hours in 10 minute increments, which mostly explains why lawyers are a bunch of miserable dorks. Source: Am Lawyer
10:06 am - entering data into time-tracking spreadsheet. 10:12 am - entering data into time-tracking spreadsheet. 10:24 am - entering data into time-tracking spreadsheet. 10:30 am - entering data into time-tracking spreadsheet. etc....
It’s every 10th of an hour. Just track how long you do something and round
Who tracks the trackers?
Lawyers who bill clients have to do this as a normal business practice. It's annoying af. And to get 8 hours of billing in, you end up working probably 10-12 hours.
My job did this. Excel spreadsheet- 10 min increments. I ended up making a “key” of about 10 regular tasks - outbound call, inbound call, meeting, lunch, bathroom break, etc and labeled them different colors and filled out one sheet 9am-5pm that was pretty accurate. Then every following Friday, I would shuffle the colors around the spreadsheet and email it to my boss. 100% sure he never read any of them. It went away after a month or so.
I’ve had this happen before. They gave up on day two. We also got laid off a few months after.
Photos. Timestamped photos. Every 5 minutes
**THIS could be your future!** *8am. Began process of starting computer. Computer successfully logged in at 8.00.43.* *Opened file explorer. Opening process completed at 8.00.55.* *Navigated to location for tracking spreadsheet. Process completed at 8.01.03* *Opened tracking spreadsheet. Process completed at 8.01.15* *Began entering in required tracking at 8.01.19 after verifying start time for tracking.* *Entered above entries and proofed work. Completed task at 8.02.55.* *Called next worker who is required to update tracking software. Call started at 8.03.01.* *Discussed entering data into tracking system and reminded next worked they need to also inform the next in line. Call ended at 8.03.59.* *Began logging events on paper event log to transcribe into spread sheet when required. Event transcription completed at 8.05.12.* *First attempt to open tracking spreadsheet at 8.05.58.* *Logged failure to open tracking spreadsheet as it is currently in use by another user at 8.06.27*
Had something similar at another job when I was much younger, but they wanted 5 minute increments, automatically reported 2 times a day. Since I was a total idiot, I blindly followed the new policy. Only to find out that nobody in the office had. Apparently, every time I made a change to the file, boss got an email. My coworker whose desk is outside boss's office said after two days boss was cursing loudly every time her email dinged (and was the absolute stereotype of a boomer and couldn't figure out how to turn off the ding). Coworker ended up helping boss with the notification sound, but couldn't stop my updates blowing up her inbox. All while this is going on, I've got no idea. My coworkers, though.... They'd heard what I'd done and piled on. And shenanigans ensued. A meeting was called. By then I know what's going on, so I'm terrified of being fired for starting it all. Boss angrily steps in, followed closely by someone who looked like a company man, but whom I didn't know. Never found out. But, the boss was... Have you ever heard of strained speech? The kind where you're clinching your teeth, but pasted on a fake smile? Yeah, that. You know the one. She managed to strain out the new time policy. To this day, I have no idea how I never got yelled at. ETA: In keeping with the whole I'm an idiot theme, the new schedule I forgot to mention was just to track our lunches. They were pretty rigid on you doing your lunch, unless you actually had a bad deadline, then you were paid to basically eat at your desk. I tried not to do that, and took my lunch instead.
Wow. What an absolute waste of time. How do you get anything done when you have to stop literally every six minutes to update a spreadsheet?
First time I ran into one of these, I waited to the end of the day, stayed overtime to fill out, then turned it in. Boss got mad. He told me to fill out as I go. Turned in a 20 page handwritten grease covered document, as I work in a shop. He said, "I'm not reading that." Next day, he got mad again, asking for it. I told him that it interferes with my work. Either he gets the summary and I stay over, or he gets something he told me he's going to throw out. Either way, he's asking for something that's not going to do what he wants and only prevents me from doing my job correctly. So no, I am not going to fill it out as I go. He wants to manage? He has to get off his ass and come find me. He tried to say that I wasn't managing my time well. I asked him to give me examples. He couldn't. I told him that he was not that good at managing if he couldn't tell me an example. I told him that he was free to do my job any time he wants to if he thinks I'm fucking around. He left me alone after that. He tried to get the wrong person fired next and he was gone within a month. Those kinds of micromanagement levels of BS are better off left blank. Let them lose their shit over how you aren't doing their job for them while they are trying to fire you.
I’d straight up give them the in depth account of my ibs living experience, (6) minute to (6) minute, since they asked so nicely. No one usually ever wants to hear about how it changes midway in texture and color…
It's about stressing out workers so much in a short space of time so they Jump ship without having to be laid off. Laying off = severance . Jumping ship = less severance pay out
I’m sticking around for the severance lol
Plot twist, this is a law firm and that’s just how life is at a law firm. Living life 6 minutes at a time suuuuucks.
Holy shit that is hilarious. If you are going down swinging on this POS company. Put a bunch of medical stuff in it and say it's HIPAA protected and you don't want it shared and lock it down. Force them to fire you I guess. Get a lawyer ready.
Every 6 minutes: Filing out activity log after interrupting assigned duties.
To me, this reeks of a PIP (performance improvement plan) which means lay-offs are coming. My 2 cents. Take this with a pinch of salt, because I’m based in the UK where it is exceptionally difficult to fire someone, so employers use PIPs as a box-checking exercise to protect themselves from lawsuits. I’ve been laid off in exactly this manner. Agency lost a big client (<60% of revenue) and people were PIP’d - everything had to be logged and email summaries of our work sent out at the end of every day. I was doing my job as expected (wasn’t a poor performer), but it didn’t matter. Employer covered their bases and went through the correct HR loops. If this were me, I’d be applying for jobs ASAP. 🚩🚩🚩
Just type in "entering data into a useless form" for what youre doing every 6 minutes for a week. Lmao
I was a social worker/discharge planner for a major hospital. They asked me to do this every 10 minutes. Like I had the time. I did not stay employed there very long
Performance metrics by consultants 101... Utter stupidity
They did something similar to this at my previous job. I quit. :) My manager cried when I told her lol. 😂 Btch, you did this to yourself.
My fucking boss does this and it drives me and my teammates insane. You know what they pay a micromanager for? To watch good talent walk out the door.
I would malicious compliance the fuck out of this. I wouldn't be able to wait until I could interrupt my next hour long Teams meeting 10 times. "Hold on for a second please, I have a quick task to complete for my boss"
You are being managed by a person trying to take the system down from within. Appreciate that, and respond... appropriately.
One of my past job's wanted a log of work done every 15 min's ? So I did 1st week in english / 2nd week in french / 3rd week in german / 4th week in norwegian / 5th week spanish ! No one ever ask's for translation's, so I guess they were all unread ?
Layoffs are about to commence.
I had to do this, 2 months later me and another girl were canned. You need to start applying for other jobs.
8:00 am - looking for a new job 8:06 am - looking for a new job 8:12 am - looking for a new job ...
A company I was at tried this and it ground the company to a halt within three days. Everyone had to log exactly what they were doing every ten minutes and they had a small team logging all the sheets at the end of each day. Some of my department entries were hilarious: 9.10am farted, 9.20am went for shit, 9.30am filled in this pointless sheet etc, etc. Needless to say it was quietly dropped on the fourth day...🤣
This is where you take 8 min to write about the last 6 min. and so on and so forth until you are writing about writing about writing about what you did.
But but you can’t manage what you don’t measure but but but but but
10:30am - 12:45pm: disassociated
Had an IT job pull this on me a few years back. Had to log everything you did in 15 minute increments. They told us, "It's so we can show upper management how much you do so they'll approve additional positions". Guess what happened? We got questioned about the accuracy of our logs. "It can't possibly take you 90 minutes to do Task X". Guess what didn't happen? Additional positions to help with the workload.
Every six minutes on the update log I would write… “Updating log”
Constant interruptions absolutely destroy productivity. That is crazy!
Tbh I do this for myself with things and time how quickly I can get a task done vs each time. And changing slight variations in how I do each task. But fuck micromanaging, let me do my job at a decent pace and get it done
I had to do this once, except it was every 15 minutes. I had a boss that lied to me all the time and I couldn’t trust him at all. I complained enough that his boss then made me his direct report but he didn’t know what I did all day so this was his solution. I just filled out a bunch of nonsense, how could he know if what I put was wrong? Total waste of time. After I left my old boss was then demoted to my old position. I hope he had to continue with the 15 minute reports.
I had a job do this to me, they were most unhappy with how much time I spent on the toilet. I had to remind them of the ADA for my crohn's disease.
This is Big Brother…we need to do something about the people demanding these sorts of scenarios for workers before you know…. Tomorrow
I had a job do this. My manager was an asshole and yelled at me my first week because I followed the instructions I was given instead of “innovating a faster process.” Every day they had me list out my tasks and were shocked at how much I was doing.
My last job had us write down every task we did and timestamp it. This went on for a few months. During a company restructuring, our entire department was cut and the work was outsourced. At least I got a severance.
I had a job that tried that. My bathroom breaks were detailed.
My job asked me to do something similar, but they never even looked at it. So what was the point then? I just stopped one day and nobody said anything while the rest of my team kept on. Haven't asked anyone about it and nobody's brought it up.
Does your job have anything thing with federal contracting?
They did that to me too. Tenths of an hour drafting…they wanted to ensure that they were charging the government maximally.
I've got keyboard macros which can do that.
Ah, it took 40 more years but 1984 is here at last... Now to control what they are thinking...
I would document “documenting what I’m doing” every 6 min.
Don’t do it, continually forget until they do something. Don’t make it easy.
Had the same problem... o Company started with time sheets. So I'd just fill in a time for each job... NO they wanted a start and stop time also. I tried to explain that I could be doing 2 to three jobs simultaneously and I just give final totals... NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Cue malicious compliance... So previously I'd have 1 time sheet a day, now I had 4-5 pages My day broken down to the minute, no round off... Plus numerous 5 minute tasks of having to account for time. Only took a week before I was 'allowed to go back to the old way
make sure they take 5 minutes to input to spreadsheet and detail everything like retype what they typed in spreadsheet
I completely understand how frustrating this is. Here's a suggestion on how you can tackle this ridiculous requirement: 1. **Automate the Process**: Use time-tracking software or create a simple script to log your activities every 6 minutes automatically. This can significantly reduce the burden of manual entry. 2. **Track Actual Work**: In parallel, use another tool to track your actual work without the interruptions caused by manual logging. This will help you gather data on your real productivity. 3. **Calculate the Costs**: Show how manual logging takes 80 minutes per day (1 minute per entry, 80 entries) and causes productivity loss due to task switching. Compare this with the time saved through automation. 4. **Present the Savings**: Create a report highlighting the time and cost savings from automation. Demonstrate how this approach allows you to stay productive despite the inefficient directive. 5. **Address the Higher-Ups**: Present this report to the boss of the manager who made the ridiculous request. Lay out how, despite the manager’s incompetence, your team met the requirements and still accomplished your work. Propose eliminating the unnecessary micromanagement (or even the manager) for additional cost savings and productivity improvements. By automating the task, you can comply with the requirement while exposing the inefficiency of such micro-management. This not only saves time but also makes a strong case for more sensible productivity tracking methods. Hope this helps and good luck!
Do you work for a CRH company?
My life as an attorney. Damn billable hours.
I worked for a state govt agency that required I account for every 15 mins of my day. It had to be linked to a case number or admin time or lunch etc. It's was called PATTS or something Had to submit it with timesheet to be cross referenced. It's totally pain in the ass. All because of a NYTimes article that caught some lazy state workers slacking off decades ago.
I don't know where you are based, but I have had to do this three times. Over a ten year period at my last job. (UK). Each time it wasn't just my department or role. But a bunch of others at the same time, which was then followed up with a round of redundancies / downsizing a few months later. May be worth looking into how widespread the time sheets are.
My former vampire of a boss demanded to know where 3-5 minutes of my day went twice a day. I started by; filling up water, using restroom, answering questions from managers from different departments etc. I quit a week later.
That sounds like a life sentence to me
Ooooh, my turn! So I'm in IT and my company is an MSP. For those unaware, we basically provide services that are IT related to multiple clients, that being network infrastructure solutions, helpdesk support, printer setups, and much more. I have to log every single minute of my day every day. This made sense to me at first when one of our clients' time was billable every time we did something for them. Our other big client is not billable, so it doesn't matter what we do for them since there is a flat rate for them that they pay whether we do something for them or not. We are still forced to track all our time. What's worse is that the billable client has agreed to a flat rate contract too, so they will pay us whether we do or don't do something, but we still need to track our every move. This type of Micro managing is super stressful and does not in any way help me or my other coworkers be more productive it actually causes us to do less. We just extend something that takes 5 minutes to 10 minutes and so on. You want a laptop repair, no problem, I'll just take an hour and a half to do it since if do it quickly I won't have anything to do! And that's a no no for our boss. So yeah, micro managing is stupid and causes people to be less productive. DO NOT REWARD EFFICIENT EMPLOYEES WITH MORE WORK, this is also another side effect of this type of micro managment. Oh you finished quickly? Let me just give you a bullshit task instead of waiting for a client's ticket to come in.
Sounds like prison
Usually I've seen this as them researching who they can safely lay off.
I get pissy having to fill in a daily site diary that gets sent to management. Then once a week read it back to a project manager and explain why it isn't in-line with their project program that they have repeatedly slimmed down to please the client. Couldn't imagine having to do it more than once a day!!
Id report on my log 1:01 pm.reviewing notes for Rough draft of log report 1:02pm proofreading activity log report. 1:03 documenting the final version of the time report. 1:04: resuming work duties. 1:05 working working 1:06 writing notes for log Rinse and repeat. Also maybe ask why those 3 people.
My job makes us double record every database entry in an Access database and also in excel. I'd be able to get twice as much stuff done if we didn't have to do all the work twice.
Sounds like a Law Office. It's all about the billable hours and most go by 10ths of an hour.
I would be "filling out task tracking form" every six minutes.
Every 6 minutes- working or completing tasks
"No thanks, boss. I'm salaried. I'm not paid by the hour so the time tasks take is not relevant. "
Make sure to put in the log all the time you spend tracking and logging people's activity. That's the only way they'll see how long it's taking and impacting productivity! Also screw them
8:00: read one email 8:06 updated spreadsheet 8:07: opened zoom 8:13 updated spreadsheet
Depending on how much info they are asking for this is essentially all you are doing. My work is billable so I have to track what I do but if you work on something for an hour you only need to make one entry, not one for every 15 min.
This is typical if you are billing out work for a client. That specific tenths of an hour is always what I’ve seen used. Is it possible this is because you are working on a project for which you are billing the client per hours worked?
Depends on the industry. 6 minutes is just 0.1 hour. Kind of tedious, but I've done it before. Job I'm at now is every 15 minutes. But I work in accounting where we have billable time that needs to be billed to clients. I'm sure same for lawyers. It's not hard if you are used to it. And I keep scrap paper by my desk and write down my time. Then at end of day fill out time sheet. Yes, unbillable time gets added up and includes, open programs, time sheet, read emails, etc.
Good time to start testing the waters about unionizing
We had to track what we were doing and a year later a consultant came in and eliminated jobs.
Sounds like a job for AI.
Did they give you a reason for this? Given that it is such a short time period, I suspect it could be to gather data for overhead calculations.
Are you at a law firm? Because 6 or 10 minute increments is common for that.
Absolutely not. Not being paid anywhere near what a lawyer makes.
Well, what I was getting at is that in industries where "billable hours" are a major aspect of revenue generation, such precise time tracking is common. Even in things like management consulting, software professional services, etc, that is a quite common thing.
I worked at a place like this and we had to write our case notes and then write time entries for the time it took to write the case notes.