Intro

I wrote this to process my own anxieties around timesheets. It’s pretty raw, but I’m trying to get more comfortable with writing out my raw thoughts. I want to iterate and improve upon them. This seems like a fine first post, but I want my future posts to improve from this one.

The rant below is about something resolved / not imperitive. At my job I submit timesheets which are used for various things. They’re not really used to measure how much I work, below is basically trying to identify why such a system stresses me out. Is it the honesty component? Is it the minutia of it all? I don’t know, so my goal is to chip away at that lack of understanding.

I don’t use a spell checker either, and sometimes I notice mistakes and leave them in. You’re reading me. Scrambled thoughts with little structure. As these are my raw thoughts, to you reader please keep this lense: What happens in the blog, stays in the blog. The moment I publish this, I will become “future Discordian” and at least parts of this will be irrelevant. I can only snapshot my mind, but I can’t proviude a continuous feed.

Timesheets Rant

Timesheets … instead of working I’m thinking of timesheets. Instead of eating, I’m stressed out about how I’m filling out timesheets. I felt stressed about timesheets before, got monthly contract. However I still have to be stressed out about them. How many people work every single second of their allocated blocks? What is work? If I get the assignment done and only because I blocked off the time, is that work? What if I thought for 3hrs, typed for 1, is that 4 hours of work? What about when I eat? Me personally, I’m always thinking of work, when I eat, when I sleep, when I hang out with friends, when I have a fire, is all that work? Again, what IS work?

To me, timesheets create dishonesty. They are an impossible system. An honest person MUST betray their principals at least a little bit or bend definitions to achieve regular timesheets. I find it hard to relax, I find it hard to do little. I love learning, I love studying, I love to make myself useful.

Is my stress justified? I have no idea. Is all or most stress a person experiences justified? Is it a balanced scale? The only thing I know as myself is that I’ve always been stressed out about anything where I cannot fit my definition of honest. To me it feels impossible for to satisfy a criteria adequetly of “what is work”. At another job with someone I highly respect (Referred to as “D” from now on) I first billed way too low … but D found over 48 hrs I worked that month in a 2 week period that fit HIS definition. So we reworked it. He wanted me to bill every time I thought of anything that had to do with the job in a constructive way. I ended up billing insane numbers of over 60hrs /w and I was immediately moved to salary. However, I did’t feel good about billing that, it does’t make sense to me. The whole system doesn’t make sense to me.

What are they trying to measure? Humans will always have their own views on right or wrong and when you pidgeonhole people into a system they will act their own way within it. When you apply a lense to this data, what do you learn? Are you deluding yourself in how time is spent? Are you rewarding the most dishonest people? Are you somehow seeing through the weeds and rewarding the most honest people? How do you allocate time effectively whilst factoring in the folley of man?

I’ve been told to always bill if you’d spend the time differently than you would at work. This came from someone who IIRC was a ski rescue person for ski slopes. They were getting at situations where they’d be asked to hang out and ski at the resort, but be on call. If they weren’t asked to do so, they wouldn’t be there. The company argued they should pay half or not at all as the person enjoys skiiing and can do so for free. However they’d spend their time differently if it wasn’t for the job so ultimately the wanted full pay, but settled for half. I personally think half here somewhat makes sense, at least not full. I feel like if you have to physically move yourself, that’s worth more. If you cannot be where you want to be. It’s not full either because unless there’s a depth of understanding to be gained by thinking about rescue opererations, or there’s some talk with team members, it’s unlikely the time can be productive.

So why do I hate timesheets so much? They’re far from the only beurocratic system I don’t fit into, even if I personally idealize beurocracy a bit. Could it be related to imposter syndrome in a sense? Thinking about it, I feel like I work WAY more than I say. I have people in my life, many, who hate how much I work. I end up drinking and smoking weed because otherwise I alienate the people around me. I’ve been trying to raise up the people around me, but most are satisfied with the mediocre. If I get a bit intoxicated, we bond better. Why is this relevant? Well … otherwise I talk about work, work is often the most interesting thing to me. That’s not by accident, if I’m not working for pay, I’m working on open source projects, I’m thinking of new ideas, I’m learning. I will never ever stop, I NEED to learn, I NEED to progress. I love my comforts for when I come down, they allow me to work and learn more.

I learn through failure. It’s what I always say, and I enjoy some people’s reactions when I say it (it’s often disgust, fear, etc, negative emotions), it makes me laugh because a negative reaction to me shows they’re probably unreasonably afraid of failure. I say unreasonable because I achieve intuitive understanding by doing it all. I’ve worked nearly every cooking tools, every metal processing machine for wires and hinges (except stamping), honestly, going to stop the list right there. It’s very long, I put myself in situation after situation because if I fail, I still gained knowledge and experience, which isn’t a failure.

Why am I talking about failure? Because I’ve failed to do timesheets time after time. I’ve never settled on a balance where I feel good about how I’m filling them out, and the person I’m submitting to is also happy. It’s never happened. The closest is a Canadian political party, they were mostly fascinated by/curious of my timesheets. I made sure to only bill up to certain minimums and maximums as their budgets were super tight. They were blown away by my deliverables and didn’t really care if my timesheets were coherent. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was basically on salary with timesheets as a formality. This lead to maximum honesty. I did think about the work less, which made it easier, but I also had “fun” billings of straight 20hrs work blocks where I absolutely did think about the work the whole time.

At the end of the day I know I’m not an idiot, but I just don’t get it. Maybe this is how I got to failure, I feel like a failure when trying to fill out timesheets. It’s stressful, it makes me manic, it makes me write out these long things. I don’t want to stress about something I feel isn’t productive. Right now this time I’m typing these words I feel is wasted time. It’s time I MUST spend because of the timesheets. This typing relaxes me, I stare at the screen, my fingers hitting the keys as I see my thoughts tumble out in realtime. I need to do it, or I won’t be correctly emotionally centred for the things I need to do today. I’m productively wasting time, is this work?