No one likes logging their time at work.

In a perfect world, all of our employers would trust us enough to believe we’re working to the best of our ability for every hour we’re logged in.

Until then, though…logging.

This IT employee did not log every ticket he touched because he wasn’t actually working them.

I’m sure all of you reading this have to log their work time in one way or another.

And I’m sure most of you don’t agree with the granularity of said logging.

So, I work in IT. Many years ago I was involved in a big project creating a new platform while maintaining the old one.

So, during the week I would spend some time on support tickets. My role was more high level, I would never be the one to actually work on a ticket.

His boss wanted him to log them all in 15 minute increments.

At one point in time, there was a new support coordinator assigned to the client account.

The number of tickets was rising and the team couldn’t keep up, threatening the new platform.

The coordinator needed metrics on the teams performance, so he generated reports from the ticketing and the time logging systems, combined them, and started looking into improvements.

Until he came across my logs.

The metrics told him I spend about two hours a week and edit a varying amount of tickets.

This looks weird and he couldn’t bill the client on tickets I worked on, so he asked me what was going on.

I explained that I would look over the list of open tickets, bulk update where needed, and log my time with a remark like “classified tickets”.

Then I would move on to my other duties.

He didn’t like that and told me to enter a time log for each separate ticket I work on.

I asked him what the minimum time was that he wanted me to log, which turned out to be 15 minutes.

So, a two-hour task took sixteen hours, per his timesheet.

Fast forward a few weeks of me spending an hour a day logging hours (and logging that task too) and creating virtual overtime of about an hour a day.

Then the coordinator comes up to me with a request to go through and update the full backlog.

I’m fine with that and tell him I’m logging that as a generic task and not per ticket.

He tells me no, it must be logged per ticket.

So finally the malicious compliance: I spend about two hours to go over the backlog and make sure everything is in order.

Then I spend the rest of the day entering everything into the time logging system.

Fun fact: I was the first to reach the system’s limits, but found a workaround to log everything.

That day, as logged in the time tracking software, I worked for more than 16 hours.

Obviously, they wanted him to stop.

The rest of the week I took it easy, came in late, went home early.

I was done for the week and every hour I worked extra would be unpaid, right?

When it came time for the invoicing, the coordinator could not justify the huge amount of hours I logged on the account (my rate was twice that of a tech support) and finally he allowed me to stop logging by the ticket.

My productivity went up again, as did my mood.

He certainly enjoyed making the point.

I did flag the potential problems and drop in productivity to the CTO and CEO, who I reported to directly, but they said to comply anyway.

We did laugh about it afterwards and learned a lesson in how not to waste time.

Thank you for reading my story!

What does Reddit think about this method? Let’s find out!

Management just can’t stay in their lane!

Those dang metrics.

Why are they like this??

“Improvements” from new managers are often the opposite.

But companies usually deserve exactly what they get.

This was a simple and effective cure.

May all of our overbearing management issues be solved so easily.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.