Employee Suggested A Time Tracking Website To Her Micromanaging Boss, So Now She Logs Every Detail Of Her Work Day
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Have you ever had a boss who wanted you to track what you do every day at work? Would you be general about it or very specific?
In this story, a micromanaging boss didn’t back off when the pandemic hit. If anything, she was even more obsessed with knowing exactly what her employees were working on.
Sick of constantly being in contact with her boss, one employee came up with an idea and knew how to phrase it so her boss would think it was a good idea.
Then she did exactly what she said she would do, and her boss suddenly realized it wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Let’s read all about it.
If you want to track our time down to the minute, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
Old story from pandemic days.
Efficiency was everything in my office. To a fault.
When we were in the office before the pandemic, it was an open concept and pretty small so my boss would literally do his work with us and constantly ask us if we were done. The entire day.
I was basically the CEO’s assistant (small company) and would do everything for her. Coffee, reports, meetings with clients. Whatever she didn’t want to do, she chucked over to me while she went gallivanting around the country.
Her boss sounds really annoying.
But since she loved to keep tabs on us, she’d send messages nearly every single hour asking for a progress report on tasks, screenshots, and what have you.
Drove us all absolutely mad. Drove me especially mad considering I was doing all her dirty work.
She had me doing a million things a day and would get viciously upset if things weren’t done to her ‘standard’.
“Why didn’t you say THIS during the meeting, OP?” “Couldn’t you have done this instead, OP?” “You can’t be this much an idiot, OP.”
Working from home wasn’t any better.
And then the pandemic happened, and things got pretty bad.
All of us had to shift to a WFH routine, which was nice for a bit while we were all getting settled. Pretty quiet, even.
Until my boss started trying to track us through endless Slacks and emails.
Endless.
OP suggested a website to her boss.
So, I had an idea.
There’s this very cool time tracking website that tracks timing and tasks. I proposed the idea to her and worded it in a way that she’d be happy with.
“With this website, you don’t have to keep track of us manually at all! You can just let us track our time and tasks and see what we do from there, and you can relax.”
“Oo, I like that. You know what, OP? You’re right. Let’s do it. I’ll sign up and I want everyone to track every single task down to the minute. I want complete accuracy and I want you all to compile it at the end of the week so I have the proof that everything is being done – and done RIGHT.”
It was a very detailed report.
“Sure thing.”
We tracked every single thing. Down to the minute too, as she said.
9.01AM: clocking in
9.04AM: getting coffee
The details get even more detailed.
9:05AM: waiting for the keurig to dispense the coffee
9:10AM: drinking the coffee
9:12AM: starting on report for client 83
9:49AM: toilet break due to coffee
OP drinks a lot of coffee.
9:57AM: washing hands (with soap)
9:59AM: back to work
10:05AM: call with client 78
10:09AM: getting another cup of coffee while on the phone with client 78
She literally tracked everything.
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10:11AM: sneezed
10:11AM: got a tissue
10:15AM: call with client ended
10:18AM: started work on other report
The plan was effective.
I think it goes without saying that she stopped tracking anything we did by the second week.
Yeah, sure, it was difficult for a while, lol. But it was worth it to get her off our backs.
Last I heard, she was still micromanaging, just not as bad as it used to be. Yay.
I’m sure her boss didn’t have the time to look through such detailed reports with details that really didn’t need to be included and were not exactly related to the task at hand. And that was the whole point.
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
This person loves the idea.
It does take time to track time.
You could do this all day!
This person expected her to track different things.
That revenge was definitely effective! Being too detailed, even for a micromanager, is the perfect way to get a micromanager to back off.
I hope all the other employees were just as detailed.
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