> it's from when he's emailing me his time spent on various tasks and I can see he's wildly passing the 40 hour mark.
I'll grant you that it is red flag that he would want to take your energy telling how long something took. It doesn't even mean anything in the given line of work. An interesting problem might be given hundreds of hours of thought – in the shower, while sleeping, etc. – but only take 15 minutes to type afterwards. What would you report? The 100 hours? The 15 minutes? Invent some kind of weighting system to offset parallel activities? And for what? None of them mean anything.
The manager's job is to take the unnecessary burden of externalities off the rest of the team, but it is a team and that means it has to cut both ways. The rest of the team has to take the unnecessary burden of internality off the manager. If that was the best political way to say "please stop, you are needlessly wasting my energy", then that makes sense, I suppose. Or, perhaps a good manager is brutally honest above being politically sensitive? A team is, after all, characterized by their willingness to remain bonded even amid strife. Without that, you just have a group of people.
I'll grant you that it is red flag that he would want to take your energy telling how long something took. It doesn't even mean anything in the given line of work. An interesting problem might be given hundreds of hours of thought – in the shower, while sleeping, etc. – but only take 15 minutes to type afterwards. What would you report? The 100 hours? The 15 minutes? Invent some kind of weighting system to offset parallel activities? And for what? None of them mean anything.
The manager's job is to take the unnecessary burden of externalities off the rest of the team, but it is a team and that means it has to cut both ways. The rest of the team has to take the unnecessary burden of internality off the manager. If that was the best political way to say "please stop, you are needlessly wasting my energy", then that makes sense, I suppose. Or, perhaps a good manager is brutally honest above being politically sensitive? A team is, after all, characterized by their willingness to remain bonded even amid strife. Without that, you just have a group of people.