Imagine working at a company where you’re supposed to submit a daily report each day explaining what you did. Would you write a few brief lines that give a high level summary, or would you go into detail?

In this story, one employee is in this situation, and he used to give a brief summary. When a manager claimed that wasn’t good enough, he decided to try the opposite extreme.

Keep reading for all the details.

So, you whom is not my manager, have emailed me, telling me that I don’t have enough detail in my daily reports. I comply.

So, I rock up to work this morning, it’s five and twenty to six and I’m there well before my manager or other colleagues.

So, I dust off my laptop and peruse my work emails for the day.

I see a snitty piece from a manager, Million Mile an Hour Mark, whom isn’t my direct line manager, telling me and others that we don’t add enough detail into our days reports.

So, in the spirit of things, I open my laptop, and therein begins my compliance.

OP didn’t spare any details.

I start the day by detailing the task briefs, the various permits, the safe systems of work, every piece of paperwork that I have to go through. And there are probably about thirty pages of paper to be read and filled in.

I detail it all.

Then there’s the phone call to the control officer to let me gain access for the day, and my “brief” brief to him explaining what I’m meant to be doing for the day.

That gets noted down too.

The manager sounds like a good guy.

And then my manager turns up.

Now, he’s not the easiest guy to work with, but he’s okay.

While he doesn’t give me the autonomy that I’m used to (previously the arrangement was – if you don’t hear from me, the job is completed) and likes to look over my shoulder a lot – he’s not too unbearable, and will stick in my court when it comes to health and safety calls – he does accept my daily reports being 1 or 2 brief sentences – something that will let him clear off his tracker, and mark my work as complete.

Well, Millions had raised my pique, and so I will comply.

It was all about the details.

So, now we detail out everything, from exact number of cable ties used, to every time we perform minor housekeeping. From simple decisions to gland size selection.

I have noted it down. Explaining in great detail everything I can. While we work.

Well, I’m not done yet, no. Now it comes to testing. And our test procedure is laborious compared to most sparks test specifications.

Now I write down how we test cables. Down to the core – and when some of your cables are huge multicores – and then detailing writing up the spreadsheet, explaining what is going on there too.

It seems like most of the day was spent writing down everything that was done.

You name it, if I’ve done it, it’s been written down.

It is certainly wasting my time, but I will comply. And I will comply tomorrow too. And the day after.

And at the end, I wrote a little note stating that my days work could have been completed with two small simple sentences – 1: Installed New Cable X12345 and had minor issue XU1234/5/6. “and” 2. Successfully tested X12345.

I followed it up with the fact that those two simple sentences cleared several managers task lists, leaving me time to focus on my work, instead of wasting time writing diaries and that wasting everyone’s time is a really unproductive way of dealing business but if they are going to persist with this nonsense I will need additional time instead of less time than they have scheduled me for my tasks.

Again, the manager sounds pretty cool.

I let a colleague know, and he’s told me he can’t even cope with reading it, it’s too long and he bursts into tears every time he tries to read it out.

I will wait for tomorrow gleefully.

So, the consequence of it was thus: I ended up at the same site as the other manager today and confronted him over his silly bollocks. And I expressed in no uncertain terms that his email was pointless.

He admitted that he was getting pressure from on high, and that he thinks I should do what I always did, because I’m in a fairly niche role where my simple statements expressing completion were appropriate. And offered to write my site diary for today by including me in his.

There are a lot of managers.

My direct manager only called me seventeen times today, which actually seems less for some reason and the general construction manager was polite to me, and didn’t give me as hard a time as he usually tries to.

And my general no concern given in terms of I know I can walk into other work easily made today a good day.

The other manager also let me know that none of the high end management actually read the diaries, they’re just making noise, but the end paying clients are, so keeping it sensible over my producing an opus of an evening for my chuckles will keep me in their good graces, because I have a reasonably good reputation with them.

My peers who have read it have agreed with me openly because our work is standardised, and install xxxx cable pretty much is self explanatory.

In short, go back to what worked before.

It’s pointless when more time is spent writing about what you did for work than actually doing the work. But, I can understand wanting to prove a point.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Here’s a suggestion.

Here’s another petty idea.

A linguist criticizes the grammar.

One person is skeptical that this really happened.

It can be a really bad idea to tempt employees to go into detail.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.