All great suggestions that wouldn’t work in my work place, unfortunately.

I work in one small office out of a great many within a huge organisation. Anything that we need to know is sent by email. In theory. Of course in practice we get huge quantities of corporate rubbish in out email inboxes, and the important things are usually not sent.

There is no way to put in notes on our electronic timesheet system. It’s a simple ‘account for your time to the nearest 15 minutes against relevant project codes’ type thing.

I personally don’t see how putting the report in when I finish work on Friday could possibly inconvenience anyone, let alone cause a life or death situation, but I know of people who now have formal warnings for not getting theirs in on time.

Crazy, but there you go. I often end up finding large businesses to be run in crazy ways. Not sure if that’s just me…

All I can say is, I would probably feel the same about it.

Yes, it is a power trip when it’s in that way. Fifteen minutes is not exactly micro-management. Five minutes, maybe. It’s arbitary chunks of time to do something. It would be better if it were task-based, with the procedures listed and ticked off.

And this 14:29 person probably thinks you would have picked it up from the general office gossip/water cooler talk.

How ‘important’ is the report? If it were a life and death situation, I would try to comply. If it wasn’t like that.

Putting it in on Thursday would be a good idea, with some notes about what you are going to do Friday. Then you can start Monday with a clean slate.

(Do you have any weekend work?)