To be fed up of having to justify my existence??

[CurlyRover]

My line manager is obsessed with matrix, timings and justifying mine and his existence. We're a small team, there's me him and his manager. He expects me to document every single minute of my day and work out what percentage of my time I'm working on what. No other team in the company works that way, they just get on with whatever job they've been given. We see the owner of the company regularly and he doesn't care about justifying ourselves. If he can see the job is being done he's happy.

I can't work this way. It stresses me out so much! Every morning he asks me for percentages and it's draining and stressful. We have a daily meeting where I have to tell him exactly what I've done the day before and how long it took to do each task.

AIBU to think this is too much and to be fed up of having to justify my existence when nobody else has to?

Yanbu

tell him 25% of your time is spent documenting what youre doing- a massive waste of time

Well, I used to be in audit and we used to work like that for billing purposes and I think lawyers are often the same, and yes, it's stressful. However, I would just approximate and if he's not happy he can take it up with his line manager

Talk to his Manager. If that fails, talk to the Owner. What a micro managing control freak.

Ridiculous micromanaging.
I agree, start including all the time you spend recording actual work. Don't forget to add a minute on to each task for making a note of every little thing.

I'm a lawyer and we have to account for all of our work this way so we can bill our clients correctly. I do find it stressful but I can see the reason for it. If you don't need to do it for billing purposes I can see why it would be a pointless additional stress. Have you asked your manager why they need that information? Maybe you could come to a compromise where you meet weekly to discuss your workload in more general terms?

Sounds like he has huge anxiety over his role. He needs to start a dialogue with his management.

Or he's just useless.

Can you call a meeting with the manager and, if possible, the owner to sort this one out? The time you spend recording time and then discussing every day what you have done must mount up quite a bit. I know time recording is the norm in professional offices, but they all have computerised systems which makes it a very quick job - I suspect that isn't the case for OP.

Lyra I totally understand the need for billing purposes. However this is not the case here. I work for a chemical manufacturing company.

He's very obsessed with metrics as it's what he needed to do in his old job. But that's not the case here.

I've gone down the route of spending an hour making a spreadsheet that shows how I've spent my time - although I've used rough figures as I'm not keeping track. Hopefully he'll see how bloody pointless it all is when he sees more than 10% of my day is spent documenting what I do.

Should I add a like for mumsnetting?

Yes & a line for going to toilet, washing hands, and.getting up from desk to stretch, abd for ackowledging and listening to your line manager. ,
And as others said , put a line for documenting time taken for every task, and for working out percentages, & for daily meetungs to discuss And put a line for acknowledging you exist for documenting, & justifying your existance.

Is it too passive aggressive to have a pie chart of:

Time spent working
Time spent having meetings about work
Time spent documenting work

?

I think he knows more than you do - that maybe your jobs are under threat or he wants to justify hiring a new team member

I had a manager who made us do this, was generally used by him to spend time faffing and reporting on it so he didn’t have to do any actual work.
I’d be adding lines in for time used filling it in, I certainly did.

I think he knows more than you do - that maybe your jobs are under threat or he wants to justify hiring a new team member

Rainbows No he's just struggling to get used to the fact that we're not as corporatey as his old place and that we don't have to justify ourselves as long as we get the job done. He's massively struggling in this environment.

I’d be adding lines in for time used filling it in, I certainly did.

Yeah I've added a line for documenting my workload. So far on about 1 hour today!

I have to do a timesheet that logs time spent on all clients. It is relatively normal in a corporate environment.

Do what he’s asked for but put together some figures demonstrating how much more productive you could be if this wasn’t required.

Hold back your figures until you’ve politely asked him what the objective for these metrics are and what tangible benefits they will deliver for the company.

It really takes an hour a day to document your work?

You need a more efficient system.

Ben no not normally but I've only just set up the spreadsheet so it took a while.

I think I'll ask him again in our morning meeting tomorrow why he feels the need to document it all. And then send him the spreadsheet.

If this keeps up I'll be talking to someone more senior asap as it's such a waste of time and I don't understand why I have to do it when nobody else Does!

fluffy I understand that. I've had to do it before but everyone was in the same situation at that point.

I think it pisses me off that I'm the only one that has to do it and tbh nobody but him gives a damn

I’m a lawyer so I’m used to recording my time in 6-minute increments. There are apps/software you can use to create timers for tasks you frequently do, so you can just click on that when you start and stop something and it will generate the report for you. There’s no way it should take an hour! It’s a PITA but if your manager is telling you to do it then I guess it’s a job requirement.

So I sent him the spreadsheet (minus the PA bits). I'm also in the process of updating another spreadsheet that he asked me to do.

Apparently it's not enough to say I spent x amount of time updating the spreadsheet you asked me to do and y amount of time updating the document you asked for. He wants to know how long each individual row of the spreadsheet took, how long each individual section of the document took.

And when I said I'm finding this all a bit stressful he had the nerve to tell me I wasn't getting stressed and I shouldn't get stressed. Fml

IAmNot can you recommend any decent apps / software for this sort of thing?

It sounds like he just hasn't understood the culture where you now work. And that he possibly thinks a metricized culture is superior and that he's doing this company a favour introducing it (it's not, he's wrong).

I would raise it as a culture problem with HR - be clear that accounting for the day is taking up far too much of the day and interfering with your ability to get on with the actual work.