Manager demands that “employee log every moment” of their time, employee complies, spends so much time filling in their timesheet that their billable hours tank: ‘After 3 weeks my overhead total was sitting at 18.75 hours for a 40-hour week’ – FAIL Blog

Data isn’t always everything, although it is often the most visible. 

In this Reddit story, an act of malicious compliance around tracking and timesheets raised a very important question about the fact that any time spent tracking time more thoroughly is actually wasting it.

We often think that our increased ability, aided by technology, to log and record every amount of data but one thing we often don’t think about is just how much time and resources all of that data that we can track takes to process.

All of that data and increased insight itself can become an occlusion, as systems feed you data you’re never going to get around to processing. All the while, more pours in and decreases the likelihood that you’re ever going to get to it.

Plus, whatever you are focusing on becomes its own bias, and the more you focus on a single or few key metrics, the more workplace behavior will distort to meet it. But the invisible work is equally as important as the KPIs you’re tracking (try explaining that in a board meeting), and the more time you spend forcing people to perform to a standard, the more you’re eating away at those tasks.

As a manager, too, all of that micromanagement becomes a massive time sink; just as soon as you’re having to spend all of your time worrying about what everyone else is doing, you can also count on the fact that you’re not getting anything done yourself.

That works for some managers who have none of their own work to do, but for everyone else there’s just no way that would be possible. 

This employee sought to get around their new boss’s micromanaging scrutiny of their timesheets and decided to bombard them with so much information they couldn’t keep up.