South Bend Busy Work

The South Bend Tribune will require its reporters to submit a detailed _ VERY detailed _ each day that explains EXACTLY what they worked on/accomplished during the "8-hour" work day.

Oh ... My ... God.

 

Easy enough solution:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging

 

Hours 7-8: Wrote a detailed report of the previous six hours of my day.

 

These must be managers who never reported, wrote or handled stories.

They also must be managers who never fucking learned how to manage.

 

Jesus. You know who I feel worse for? The mid-level manager who's going to have to read all that shit.

And what's this 40-point scale bullshit?

Eat it, South Bend.

 

No. These are managers who are looking for excuses to cut staff and expect said staff to provide them.

 

This was my favorite part.

Here would be mine
Came in at 9. Tried to check e-mail. Software not working. Told IT guy, he said he was working on it, then went back to playing his video game. Tried to check e-mail using webmail. Was able to get it to work. Mostly spam. One might be worth looking into. Also made lunch plans via e-mail. Bought Diet Dr Pepper from vending machine. Planned out weekly budget, did staff meeting. After meeting, server down on newsedit, unable to input weekly budget. Logged onto sportsjournalists.com. Got in flame war with Old_Tony over Obama. Looked at Romenesko, and checked local blogs to see what was going on. Left for lunch, which consumed nearly two hours. Went to interview at 2. visited with sources. wrote story once IT guy said server was back up. checked the cutlines that photog wrote. went home.

 

I had a manager at a Gannett paper insist upon me doing this when he suspected I wasn't using my time wisely. All that happened was I became less efficient, but he was happy because he now had documentation of how my time was spent. I got less actual work done than before, but who cares about that, right?

 

They should all get Twitter accounts for this.

 

I thought the L.A. Times folding the California section into the national/foreign section was the height of the stupidity I'd be reading about today.

And then I looked at this thread.

Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. Armchair_QB has it pegged exactly right.

Well, we know what these managers' daily-report emails would read like, if they had to write them...:

Read staff's daily productivity reports.

Hmm, I wonder if that would be considered enough to save their jobs. If they were being assessed that way, of course.

 

HA! My shop already does this. Not to the extent of South Bend, but we have to document what we do each day.
Since basically my responsibilities are very similar from day to day, I write it once in the first day of the week, then draw arrows to each subsequent day.