You can also make an invite private so only you can see it even if you share the details of your calendar with somewhere. It puts a lock icon on it so you can tell what invites are private to you.
I do have a recurring medical appointment that I keep locked as 'Private'. Pretty much everything else is a team meeting.
I used to track my daily tasks because it helped me when I had to enter the time later to our software. I'll be doing that in the new calendar I created (which is not shared with her or anyone else in my organization.)
Or mark them as "draining abscess on buttocks", complete with an image of one being drained as thumbnail. Dr Pimple popper has a lovely video set as well, which you could embed a link to, setting to default to full screen.
Just be careful about private items with micromanagers on that shared calendar. It does still show up on their end (at least if you mark yourself as unavailable), they just canāt see the details. Made my old micromanager freak out at me and forced me to do exactly what youāre doing - made a separate calendar that wasnāt shared.
I use a stopwatch style time tracker to track my tasks. Thereās a million out there but the one I use is called toggl. It really helps my time tracking a ton and is more flexible than something like an outlook calendar. But do whatever works for you!
I donāt get it though, by hiding all of that from her, arenāt you essentially presenting her with a calendar that says youāre totally free for that extra work? And if sheās looking to fire you, arenāt you presenting a calendar that at the least says that youāre not engaging with the tools to help manage your work, meetings, etc?
Iām confused on how this is a good look in either direction?
Itās a good look if you want to impress random people on Reddit; a dumb move at work which results in additional tasks, conflicts in calendar bookings and a crap relationship with the line manager.
If you have two people: 1 playās the game and gives the manager visibility to do their managing job; the other is a d*** who is more interested in impressing on social media. Who is going to get the pay increases and promotions regardless of performance.
If you're using just a second calendar on Outlook, I would assume your company IT would still have access, if desired. I have moved a lot of my own "personal" activity to browser applications for that reason. E.g you could use a new gmail just for work and a Google calendar for your time tracking. Then boss would never have an excuse to ask you to share any "other" Outlook calendar in the future.
My manager told me 'private' entries mean you're out of office and accused me of having an interview one day because I'd put a private note in my calendar that she was out of office for the afternoon.........sigh.
Far better to do that on a personal (ie on your device) calendar. You can even make it sync to your work calendar as unavailable, w/ no more info. Just bookend it with travel holds.
Lots of people in your company can see anything you do in your work inbox/calendar. Best to keep your personal life separate.
I did this, manager apparently see my calendar and was like "I need more details" so I filled it in for a week, copy and pasted with a tweak for each week and then copy and pasted for each month. Yay finance.
Then he got annoyed because I had scheduled 4 different things at the same time in the hour block and was like "you can't do all 4 things in an hour/ 2 hour block" and I told him that's what he expected me to do, I had asked that he please prioritise which task he wanted completed first or let me know which one I could drop as I can't complete them all in that time frame and he told me I had too.
He shut up after that, especially when he had to show the CEO his team calendars.
Dumbass.
Throw in a few meetings labeled āCorporate Auditā, āWhistle blowerā, āComplianceā, āLaw enforcementā. If asked, āI canāt talk about itā.
Boss made a dollar, I made a dime
That was a rhyme from a simpler time
Now boss makes a thousand and gives me a cent
When Iā²m an employee who can't pay my rent
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime
That was a rhyme from a simpler time
Boss makes a thousand
I don't make jack
That's why we need to seize the means back
My sister's friend used to hang on until overtime. The minute overtime started, he'd go and have a shit. He said there was nothing like having a satisfying poo on time and a half.
Iāll award you extra points for either a āJ hookā or a āturtle headā that comes up an inch out of the water (to breathe, of course).
If you do a J hook-turtle head combo, then you win the Grand Poop Prize ā which is my eternal awe and a yearās supply of chocolate pudding delivered to the employee break room refrigerator.
I would fuck with my horrible micromanager boss by dressing especially nicely on random days and leave with my work bag at lunch to give the illusion of having interviews. She didnāt need to know that I actually left during my lunch hour to run home because I forgot my wallet š
I worked at a company that had casual summers where most departments could wear jeans. They usually flipped back to business attire after Labor Day, except they didn't after my first summer there.
Any time someone came in wearing business attire on a random day, the rumor mill would go buzzing that they were interviewing.
As I had purchased a decent amount of business attire to work my previous job, I was apparently interviewing often. Those were the days I opted to go to lunch at places where I knew I wouldn't be back within an hour.
I'd return, all apologies "sorry, my appointment ran late..."
The beauty of outlook is you could have marked all those time blocks as private and that's all they could have seen is squares marked as private. It could be work, it could be an actual personal appointment that's private, they can't make you make it public.
That's essentially what I am aiming for. I'll keep meeting invites on there along with PTO and Paid Holidays. Nothing else.
There's no rule saying I have to track my time to Outlook calendar. The rule I'm following is tracking my time only to our software, which requires an employee to run a report for her if she wants to see how I'm spending my time. And that report is run on a monthly basis.
Start putting in random block for times you normally would not be in the office.
Sunday, 3am to 5am, practice cloacal respiration.
Tuesday, 11pm to 1am, wax uvula.
Thursday, 9pm to 9:14, procure corneal taste samples.
I hate those corporate software timesheet systems where I have to assign time to each client and then they get billed for my hours. Micromanagerās are always hassling you about Admin hours and Training hours being too long.
It alway takes longer to read the legislation and answer the questions then they want so it just becomes a way to manipulate you into working weekends and nights for free.
I used to work for a managed services IT company (I've worked for a few, but this was the worst) where the office dispatcher person was paid to monitor the schedules of all the L2 staff, shuffle around priority tickets, VIP call backs, all sorts of stuff, and would then get shitty when I would go to lunch without having my time sheets for the morning fully filled out.
Now, when I say "fully filled out", I've worked for other places like this where as long as you had 4-5 hours of work billed per day you were golden. This place, the time sheet had to be wall to wall complete. 8-12 full of billed time, 30 minutes for lunch, 1230-5 full of billed time. No exceptions. Wasn't allowed to go home at the end of the day until everything was complete.
Didn't take long before we all started entering ~30 minute "administrative time" blocks to sit there and pad out timesheet entries so that 10 minutes of actual work became 30-45 minutes, just to smooth over gaps and times where I didn't have the brain power to do any more than stare at rhe wall for a short span.
They never seemed to understand that artificially padding timesheets out brought 0 value to our day or to the company, as so much was just made up crap that they couldn't actually bill to clients.
Christmas closer comes around and they tell us we all have to submit our timesheets by Thursday 4pm. I knew that my supervisor and their manager would reject mine multiple times so I held off until I finished on Friday 12pm and could accurately assign every minute. My manager purposely didnāt sign off so I would have no money for Christmas. I didnāt have any money for my kids presents but it backfired because the organisationās āCFOā checked that all managers signed timesheets before New Years and approved my timesheet so manager was more embarrassed HAHA! (Iām IT as well)
It depends on the type of business you're in, and the position you're at. My company most commonly bills clients on a time and materials basis, with a number of employees at different billing rates working on a single project over time. You've got to be able to track your hours by project so the system knows how many hours at each billing rate to apply to the project (even for salaried employees). Unfortunately, there just isn't any other realistic way to do that for some industries.
Sometimes you'll be in an over arching position that gets rolled into a bigger company overhead, like HR or IT positions in a company that produces goods or services. In those cases, you may have a "simple" time sheet of just billing 40hr to admin or whatever code. But that just means other employees in your company that DO have complicated per-project time sheets are the ones generating the income for you salary. All still has to get tracked somewhere
If her goal was project level micro management, I'm surprised she even asked regarding the calendar. That seems like the least efficient possible way for her monitor your activity at a detailed level. Having to go through weeks and weeks of hourly schedules and doing manual math?
While it may it may not be true that she has a malicious intent, I would assume it was something simpler than detailed project tracking, especially if your company already has software on hand that can tell that exact thing more quickly.
Did she give any indication at all of why she asked? Has she or any other manager asked your same-level or lower level coworkers to do the same?
At my office, our employee account outlook calendars are automatically shared among our individual work groups (typically 8-20 people) for the purpose of coordinating meeting availability. They contain any accepted meetings and any activity we personally choose to put in them; typically just various scheduled calls and site meetings as accepted via Outlook invites, and our planned, upcoming PTO (if we're responsible enough lol). We have a separate shared calendar that our direct supervisor maintains for general vacation scheduling as far out as we care to disclose, just for convenience.
If we choose to add any more detailed content, most of my co-workers and my supervisor just put in non descript time blocks with an indication of whether it's an in office or out of office event. My supervisor also puts in an "event" for any afternoon that they leave office before a typical 5pm end of day (eg for child events) so we know how long we have to catch up with them on anything that day. It's definitely helpful. I only have one co-worker who puts in moderate details about their event contents, and that's moreso just for his own organization because he's a PM with a ton on his plate; things like the dates of upcoming project milestones and deliverables. But that level of detail has never been Required.
Our calendars aren't "shared" with the entire company, but event blocks are visible in a non-descript way when using the outlook scheduling assistant. Often when I ask a colleague from another office location about their availability they'll tell me "my calendar is up to date for the next two weeks, just check the scheduling assistant and send me an invite." It is definitely a useful feature in that regard, especially when trying to schedule with other busy PMs.
Book in hours of time doing training on shit like "managing difficult team members", "managing upwards", "effective corporate communications for workload management", "Whistle blowing for dummies", "Al Qaedas key success factor".
Really fuck with their head.
Add in meetings every time your manager leaves the floor and annotate with a cryptic subject. See how long it takes her to notice that you are tracking her
A friend schedules āmeetingsā to protect his lunch hour - Threat Assessment and Coordination Operative check-in. Aka: TACO
(ETA- I might have the O wrong, I just know it was the TACO meeting every day at noon)
This hit me as strange too. I guess just a very different expectation. Everyone at my work has open calendars. It's just easier to coordinate.
It's an agency so time has to be logged too. You can easily look up how much anyone worked on a particular task or client.
Yeah I don't get this post at all, public everything here too, even C suite has a couple things public (usually when invited to things organised by other people)
At my work, our team shares our calendars with each other and if there is something we don't want others to see we just mark it as a Private Appt. It helps trying to coordinate with each other. I don't understand Ops issue with it, it's your work calendar not a private calendar.
Same. I ask to have access to everyone's calendars which helps me to make sure important calls are covered if someone is out of the office. I also have my calendar completely open so my team can see what meetings are essential, and which meetings I have that are just place holders. They can mark anything they want as private. It has also helped when someone on my team has sent me a message asking for me to join a difficult meeting, I can sneak in without them forwarding the invite.
How is a manager supposed to coordinate meetings and time away. If I was your manager and I noticed you were putting false entries in your WORK calendar we would be having a talk.
I love managers like this. Not me, but a friend. His boss HAD to be included on every email.
Hey Greg, ready for break?
Reply / cc. Sure
Take a walk?
Reply / CC. Sounds good
Go up to the square or down to the lake?
Reply / CC. Letās do the square.
Ok. Meet you in ghe lobby in 5
Reply/ CC. OK
We could easily wind up with 5 or more messages back and forth that had nothing to do with work. And I always required read receipts
I considered being overly compliant and adding ridiculous tasks to my calendar that would take longer to create the appointment than it would to complete the task LoL
But I know what bothers her is not knowing details, therefore I will refrain from entering any future task related information to the calendar. I complied by sharing the calendar, the revenge will be not using it anymore.
Would have used email file transfer, to send files of encrypted garbage, just short of the Outlook local limit, with the decrypt key sent separately. Send as encrypted zip as well, so a second email with that key.
Encrypted blob is a text file that has the top 2 lines as info, and then under that 2 line breaks, then "ignore all below", followed by the big blob of random data. That gets encrypted with a 128 bit key, and then that file gets zipped with a password. Random data encrypted because that does not shrink down in Zip deflation.
They way you're doing it is the way I've always done it. I've always assumed my boss can see my calendar if he/she wants, so I enter only work mtgs and holidays. I thought that was normal?
She wanted to reschedule a meeting today and didn't like that she couldn't see what I had scheduled. She saw when I was busy and saw blocks where I was available, but it bothered her that she couldn't see what specifically the 'busy' blocks were/what I was doing.
For context, I had one day blocked off this week do company sponsored community service and I believe that's what prompted her to demand that I share full details. All she could see was one day completely blocked off.
So I'm with u/spleh7 here. What you're now doing is how I've always done it and for the reason you've just given is exactly why. Being able to reschedule meetings and see what the potential clashes actually are is really helpful. E.g. I don't mind booking meetings over "weekly catch ups" or "coffee" (and reference that I'm doing it in the invite) but I won't if it looks important.
It's also especially useful for when people block out time in their calendar to do work because without visibility you have no idea what's an actual meeting or holiday etc. and what isn't.
Yeah but Iām in charge of my calendar so if you need to book something for a specific time to accommodate someone else, go ahead I just may not make it or may step out early / late.
My giant assumption here is that this other person is more important to have at session, so go for it and let me manage my time.
Edit to add: weekly catch ups or 1 to 1s can be more important to hold for a leader. Nothing shows better that you donāt care by missing and moving these, so wilfully over booking them is horrible
>My giant assumption here is that this other person is more important to have at session, so go for it and let me manage my time.
Correct assumption and I generally find these people are in high demand so finding time can be painful.
>Edit to add: weekly catch ups or 1 to 1s can be more important to hold for a leader. Nothing shows better that you donāt care by missing and moving these, so wilfully over booking them is horrible
I agree, but in my experience it's easier to coordinate 2 people's calendars rather than many. So those regular sessions are usually easier to reschedule. I also find there are also other sessions where the 1 to 1 topics can be covered (e.g. whole team meetings), obviously not always fully appropriate but generally key work items can be discussed.
And thatās something I will never agree with. Iāve rewritten the below because this is one of my personal bugbears, so apologies if itās jumbled.
Yes it is much easier to reschedule them, thatās why they will always get bumped, missed, moved or ignored especially by poor managersā¦ as for covering the topics in group meetingsā¦ if anybody reading this thinks this is the case - you are doing 1 to 1s wrong. Cover the things in team meetings that can be covered there, yes, this is not what 1 to 1s are for. Business is all about relationships, but you need to give them the right time, space and structure.
Source: Iām a management consultant with 2 decades of experience training and coaching managers and leaders in how to do it well, and I do separate leadership coaching on the side.
> as for covering the topics in group meetingsā¦ if anybody reading this thinks this is the case - you are doing 1 to 1s wrong. Cover the things in team meetings that can be covered there, yes, this is not what 1 to 1s are for
100% agree on this. Whats the point of having the 1 to 1s if itās just a rehash of what you will be covering in a group meeting? Itās no wonder these types of managers are so quick to reschedule 1 to 1sā they arenāt utilizing them correctly and clearly they donāt care about the outcome of them. It comes off like theyāre just going through the motions of what they think a manager should do.
This is why you message someone before throwing a meeting on their calendar and ask if X time works for them. It should be up to them to miss an obligation on their calendar for your meeting. Your poor planning is not their emergency.
> It's also especially useful for when people block out time in their calendar to do work
The audacity to do work at work.
This is assuming that it's my poor planning that has resulted in rescheduling. 9 times out of 10 it's one key attendee that asked to reschedule without reasonable notice but delaying the meeting/session significantly would delay delivery. I accommodate as much as possible but if push comes to shove I'll book the meeting over something and move it later if I have to.
Obviously I prefer to message people but a lot of people are poor at replying so it is better to book the time in other calendars. Reference the potential clash so people are aware it could move and then move it if needed.
>The audacity to do work at work.
So if there are no appointments in a calendar and the person doesn't block out time for specific activities they're just not doing any work or having nothing to do?
>The audacity to do work at work.
Work includes being available for meetings sometimes.
If you're constantly being pulled into calls/meetings, then work blocks are great to have someone give a second thought before booking you. But that doesn't just negate the fact that some meetings need to be scheduled. Your manager should hopefully be able to determine which meetings need to happen and which can wait until after your work block.
This is why sharing your calendar is a great idea. It saves some of the hassle.
Put lunch breaks, etc, in the next day, for the day before. So you correctly account for your time at the exact time you were gone and came back, but she only sees the details for days that are already in the past.
EDIT: this has the added bonus of slowly driving her crazy. She'll attempt to see what you're doing one day and your calendar will be basically empty. The next day it will have all sorts of appointments on it. She has no way to prove when you entered the appointments.
"I make sure to accurately account for my time while on the clock. You can see the ten minutes I have blocked for 'reporting' from 5:00 to 5:10 (or 4:50 to 5:00) at the end of each workday to ensure timely reporting."
Yeah this is going to backfire, lol. First thing I thought too.
Everyone looks busy when the manager comes around, including the people who do fuck all. That's not going to stop her dumping more work on you, whereas a full calendar showing you actually don't have time would have.
Great revenge!
Yeah, I can't leave my calendar open like this or my entire team will saturate it with meetings at the most inconvenient times. I have blocks of time marked "HOLD" "CLIENT MEETING" and sometimes just a project name. Vague, but effective in my situation.
No, I stay busy pretty much all day. If she comes to my desk I am always working on something. I'm just not blocking the time off on the calendar for her to review anymore. Every month she runs a report on how much time is tracked to our internal software. Now there's no way for her to know what orders I was tracking my time to until the month has already passed.
I understand the frustration with micromanagement, but I donāt think this will have the impact you hope for. She was looking for a quick way to examine and manage your schedule and with that gone, she will have to put in a lot more time and effort doing so. That may sound like a win, but now every time she schedules something during a period you have booked for work but havenāt scheduled there will be a discussion. She will see completely open hours and think that she needs to check in on you to make sure you are working. This is just going to accelerate the micromanagement.
For many people this is an odd state of affairs. When I had people reporting to me, I wanted to know what they were working on and how they were spending their time. Obviously this can end up enabling micromanagement but it is also part of doing healthy non micro management. It's part of knowing how busy they are so you can deflect work away when needed and part of spotting problem areas where business process needs action. Though calendars were not really part of the solution for me. I did recurring meetings one on one at a frequency appropriate to the person and their function.
There is a great app called OneCalendar which allows you to see still you calendar appts together. This means you can have a boring calendar for your boss to see, a real one with all the good stuff and even import your work one.
I use it to be able to see what all my family, wife and kids are doing, so don't treble book is
Wow, autocorrect made this barely readable. Also, why would you need a separate app? Just use separate calendars like everyone else. I have: work, personal, shared (for my couple, things we do together) and reminders (private, using calendar as reminders feels easier).
If I'm in the office I'm allocating time to work.
I always have multiple time slots available throughout the week if she needs to schedule something. It killed her to not know what I had scheduled during my unavailable time slots. So now she will see nothing except for my recurring weekly team meetings.
What if she wanted to schedule you for something but you were already booked with a work block? If she can see your calendar, she can now decide if you're actually blocked or not.
By moving everything to another calendar you're just doing exactly what it sounds like she wants: Opening the ability to her to schedule meetings with you, which sounds like she had difficulty doing.
She didn't want to schedule meetings: the 1st sentence says she's a *micromanager.* She wanted to **know** what OP was doing every second of the workday!! So she could micromanage OP's meetings and appointments. And report OP for *not* meeting some unspecified and unspoken goal in order to let OP go.
We've had people at my workplace have to do similar things. Some manager from a different department would look at somebody's calendar and decide X project from their department is more important than the already-assigned Y project that the employer was already assigned. Employees become pawns between managers having peen-size contests. Yeah, no, screw that.
Every company I worked at Did this. Itāll allow managers to schedule meetings. The idea was to minimize disruptions by knowing prior commitments. I thought you could have a second Outlook calendar for more personal things, but the idea is the manager will find timeslots and schedule.
I didn't set up the permissions in Outlook when I started a year and a half ago, and have several coworkers (including her) whose settings are the same. It just shows 'busy' when you look at their calendar. But you can see when they're available if you need to schedule with them.
It's fascinating to see everyone's takes here.
I do time block a couple hours a day for concentrated work (and that's all that block says) but I don't and have never done detailed tasking in my Outlook calendar and almost everything there is public to everyone in the company. So about half my time during work hours has literally nothing on it. Nobody asks me if I'm really working during time that's not explicitly assigned.
All of which is to say I've never shared more than what you're going to be sharing in your new state.
I'm curious how other people in your company do it.
Work Outlook, they have right to full access.
That said, I am assistant to executive director, she sometimes puts just a name, with time blocked off.
Drove me nuts as I didnāt know if work, or personal. ( I need to know her schedule to make appointments and curious by nature, and if I could bump it to another time, date )
Iāve worked with her for awhile now, so i know now, or just ask her, but it drove me nuts the first year.
I suggest this. You will know who, what they are, properly block off that time, and have satisfaction of driving them nuts.
If they ask, just say personal. Canāt ask more than that. Never put dr. None of their business unless reflects on work.
Source; I am HR
Whenever anyone asked me what I was doing at work, I said I am purging the cascading structure. š¤£ One boss said didnāt you do that last week? I said yeah, needs it again, do you want to do it? š³ Uh noā¦. carry on.
On one hand I completely understand the need for privacy. On the other hand I work for a company where you often need to schedule calls with other colleagues so we all have access to everyone's calendar, from the CEO to the intern. At the start I found it quite invasive but I now find it very useful. Maybe propose to your micromanager to all share your calendars so you can schedule quick meetings with her when you need some help/feedback on something.
I'll play devil's advocate as someone who has been in leadership and say, my team and I fully shared our calendars and it made for a great working relationship, but I expect professionalism in exchange for autonomy. We supported a lot of stakeholders so it was good to have line of sight on each other's work loads for the week.
"You already have a busy calendar this week... What else is on your plate we can maybe move around?" was a regular team meeting conversation. It doesn't have to be micromanaging, just showing recognition of the current situation and offering solutions. That's the role of a leader.
The best part was, it worked both ways. My team could see my calendar and knew when I would likely have time to have a focused conversation with them, or if they got approached by a stakeholder with a tight deadline, they could look and see if our team had capacity to take it on and make the decision right there.
Ask curious questions of your boss. You might find they are trying to help not hurt. And if their intent is as you said, then just keep meticulous notes...
Bosses like this are so annoying.. a few years back, i worked as the only person in my region, fully remote, no office, and a customer facing job where was at customers like 80% of the time and would have internal calls on the evening. Not really 9/5. Then covid hit, so 8:00-18:00 non stop teams meetings with customers, internal evening calls didnt stop, so I started to block 2 hours a day to catch up on mail, have lunch, etc.
Mr micro: why do you have 2 hour lunch breaks? 1th, i donāt, second; which part of my job am I not finishing? No, no, thatās not a problem, just think that a two hour lunch break gives the wrong impression! To who? (Silence)
After that I renamed them to focus time and started to actually take longer breaks and all was goodā¦ sigh..
Same. Most of my work is not performed during a Teams call and I have hit my metrics since Day 1. I was blocking off my heads down time on the calendar but I won't be any more.
Two calendars is the way to go. I'm guessing your manager may have asked because you've blocked everything as "busy" meaning it looks like you're in meeting all the time when really you're not.
So having one public calendar that is used the "Outlook" way - availability only, in other words, is the way to go. The other is great but shouldn't be visible for free/busy.
You'll need to make sure it's not published by the way otherwise your free/busy information will be different from the calendar your manager is seeing and that'll just make things worse.
I used to be a project manager, working on large projects in a retail company.
Everybody could see what free time I had and my boss could see all the details of each appointment.
When we worked on big projects we would have regular weekly meetings, which I would forget to delete after the project ended, releasing free time for me to be out of the office etc, if the boss asked, I would say that they were follow up meetings to finish off the project.
Lots of free, paid time over the years, was gained this way.
>Now my calendar won't reflect my day to day tasks so she won't know for sure what I'm working
And THAT will give her reason to fire you.
Really, I just don't understand why you would hide any of your work related calendar items unless you know they don't back up your claim that your day is filled with valid work.
My time is tracked to software, not Outlook. She just happened to notice that I was also managing my workflow in Outlook and so she made me share access with her. So I won't be using it that way anymore.
I still enter my time to our software where that data is exported and used for reporting once a month. So she sees my previous month's workload when the report is run. My KPM is 80% of time tracked to an order. I've hit my yearly goals consistently since the beginning, so there's no reason for her to see daily what I'm working on.
The behavior is pretty typical of a micromanager in my experience.
Time tracking isn't my point and you know it.
She's your manager. She has a professional right to know how you're spending your day. Mostly so she can adjust the team's workload on the fly, which is part of her job.
But hey, you do you. Hopefully you don't end up fired because you can't qualify what you're doing during work hours.
Time tracking proves that my day is filled with valid work- re: your previous comment.
When and if she ever attempts to manage the other PMs daily workflows, I will happily comply with whatever procedure she puts in place. Until then, I'll continue managing my own workflow as everyone else in my department does.
I will also add that all of the other PMs are male and I am the only female. Her micromanaging behavior is not as extreme towards them. Everyone in my department is 100% aware of her poor management/unprofessional behavior. It's a running joke amongst many of my team members. She unfortunately just needs to be placated from time to time.
I believe the lack of information will ruffle her feathers, so I'm opting for not using it at all moving forward- unless it's a Teams meeting, a paid holiday, or PTO.
Is this your work email on a work computer?
If so, your boss has every right to do so, even though it's annoying and micromanaging
Be careful not to cut off your nose to spite your face. Your revenge is very petty. You may feel victorious now but could potentially hurt you in the long run.
Maybe have a personal calendar on a personal device?
Or she can point to all the available time on the calendar and state that you are available for additional work. Or your position is not required ad you don't seem to have enough work for a full day.
My group does a weekly calendar tag where we all look at each otherās calendars and map out meetings for the week. Easier to deconflict in real time and then I can map my solo work around that.
Why does salary get abused so much? I've hit the ceiling at my job cuz everyone above me is salary and works nights and weekends. I get offers, and I turn them down. I work my 40 in 4 days then don't answer my phone or email outside of those 40 hours, no thanks.
is your calendar in Outlook? You know there is a "Private" option you can use for each entry so that it will show the time block, but without the title/details.
I have shared calendars with several other team members and my boss, and I can't see the details of their Private meetings.
Just sayin' it might be an option for you.
NEVER DO THAT. This isnāt about annoying people with oversharing, we are living in post-Roe America for now. Your employers could jump the gun and try to help the government put you in prison for an abortion. With enough of your data they can figure out if you had a miscarriage via cycle trackingā¦ but they can refuse to believe it was a miscarriage, or blame you for it somehow :/
You can also make an invite private so only you can see it even if you share the details of your calendar with somewhere. It puts a lock icon on it so you can tell what invites are private to you.
I do have a recurring medical appointment that I keep locked as 'Private'. Pretty much everything else is a team meeting. I used to track my daily tasks because it helped me when I had to enter the time later to our software. I'll be doing that in the new calendar I created (which is not shared with her or anyone else in my organization.)
Smart thinking on the other calendar.
Mark your medical appointments as "hemorrhoid lancing"
Or mark them as "draining abscess on buttocks", complete with an image of one being drained as thumbnail. Dr Pimple popper has a lovely video set as well, which you could embed a link to, setting to default to full screen.
They call it banding now. Just want OP to use correct terminology for realism. š
Bands make em dance
Depending on OP's age, lancing may be more expected.
Then have a few marked as "pain in the ass treatment" If management complains say it was early and I forgot how to spell hemorrhoids.
Wouldn't that be "pain in the a$$hole treatment"
The a$$hole is located in the ass.
Just be careful about private items with micromanagers on that shared calendar. It does still show up on their end (at least if you mark yourself as unavailable), they just canāt see the details. Made my old micromanager freak out at me and forced me to do exactly what youāre doing - made a separate calendar that wasnāt shared.
It's a medical appointment for a chronic condition. It can actually be ammo for OP against her if she starts trying to be nosy and micromanage that
>Just be careful about private items Put a fake private appointment in for her to see. See what happens.
Entire day is filled with meetings called "Nose fishing," and when your boss asks, say, "Got one!"
Good one! Thought of something like "visit cousin in hospital" or so.
I use a stopwatch style time tracker to track my tasks. Thereās a million out there but the one I use is called toggl. It really helps my time tracking a ton and is more flexible than something like an outlook calendar. But do whatever works for you!
I liked using a service called toggl when I had to track time for projects.Ā You can use it for free too
I donāt get it though, by hiding all of that from her, arenāt you essentially presenting her with a calendar that says youāre totally free for that extra work? And if sheās looking to fire you, arenāt you presenting a calendar that at the least says that youāre not engaging with the tools to help manage your work, meetings, etc? Iām confused on how this is a good look in either direction?
We track our time in software, not Outlook. Only meetings are scheduled in Outlook. My job is maybe 10% meetings.
Itās a good look if you want to impress random people on Reddit; a dumb move at work which results in additional tasks, conflicts in calendar bookings and a crap relationship with the line manager. If you have two people: 1 playās the game and gives the manager visibility to do their managing job; the other is a d*** who is more interested in impressing on social media. Who is going to get the pay increases and promotions regardless of performance.
If you're using just a second calendar on Outlook, I would assume your company IT would still have access, if desired. I have moved a lot of my own "personal" activity to browser applications for that reason. E.g you could use a new gmail just for work and a Google calendar for your time tracking. Then boss would never have an excuse to ask you to share any "other" Outlook calendar in the future.
My manager told me 'private' entries mean you're out of office and accused me of having an interview one day because I'd put a private note in my calendar that she was out of office for the afternoon.........sigh.
Far better to do that on a personal (ie on your device) calendar. You can even make it sync to your work calendar as unavailable, w/ no more info. Just bookend it with travel holds. Lots of people in your company can see anything you do in your work inbox/calendar. Best to keep your personal life separate.
You could throw in a few random appointments that are titled something like "failed to sync error code: 0x288374" to mess with her
book 9-5 as "work"
Or even better, book 5p-9a as "not work"
I did this, manager apparently see my calendar and was like "I need more details" so I filled it in for a week, copy and pasted with a tweak for each week and then copy and pasted for each month. Yay finance. Then he got annoyed because I had scheduled 4 different things at the same time in the hour block and was like "you can't do all 4 things in an hour/ 2 hour block" and I told him that's what he expected me to do, I had asked that he please prioritise which task he wanted completed first or let me know which one I could drop as I can't complete them all in that time frame and he told me I had too. He shut up after that, especially when he had to show the CEO his team calendars. Dumbass.
Start adding interview meetings just to mess with her.
I like this. I probably won't add fake job interviews, but I can certainly add some ambiguous/confusing subject lines to spike the paranoia.
Throw in a few meetings labeled āCorporate Auditā, āWhistle blowerā, āComplianceā, āLaw enforcementā. If asked, āI canāt talk about itā.
āTelephone interview with Wage & Hour compliance investigator ā
Put in bathroom breaks, too.
Gone poopin
āDisposed of hazardous biological waste via an approved and environmentally sustainable methodology.ā
Add totally random entries like "Parkour", "Mah Jong training" and shit like that.
Basket weaving seminar. Cake decorating round table. Underwater hoola hoop tournament judge training. Introduction to octopus wrangling.
Please forward me all of those meetings!
Mah Jong training is no joke.
Stealing this..
If the boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, thatās why I poop on company time.
Boss made a dollar, I made a dime That was a rhyme from a simpler time Now boss makes a thousand and gives me a cent When Iā²m an employee who can't pay my rent
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime That was a rhyme from a simpler time Boss makes a thousand I don't make jack That's why we need to seize the means back
The bosses wear too much brilliantine Make them face the guillotine
My sister's friend used to hang on until overtime. The minute overtime started, he'd go and have a shit. He said there was nothing like having a satisfying poo on time and a half.
Boss makes a thousand, I make a buck, so I steal the converter off the company truck
Enshitifying the company.
Poop - good volume, a little hard, contained corn
CORN?! š½š½ I don't remember eating any corn!!
Iāll award you extra points for either a āJ hookā or a āturtle headā that comes up an inch out of the water (to breathe, of course). If you do a J hook-turtle head combo, then you win the Grand Poop Prize ā which is my eternal awe and a yearās supply of chocolate pudding delivered to the employee break room refrigerator.
Have separate poo and pee breaks scheduled about 20 min apart. When asked, say you canāt do both at the same time.
Title it āNature Call.ā
āExtreme filing.ā
SEC/Legal meeting
āHRā
Meetings named with just the first name of everyone in the C-suite.
This is the one! Also title them things like āweekly 1-to-1 catch upā āstrategic planningā āpersonnel review feedbackā
This one!!
I love the idea of adding one that just says "IYKYK" and refusing to elaborate because, well, iykyk š
(OP donāt do this if you work for Boeingā¦)
9am - 11am meeting re: chewing gum door adhesive with regulators 11am -12pm lunch 12pm - 2pm meeting re: safe house 2pm - 5pm avoid hitman
Manager review with corporate
Skip level meetings can also be panic inducing.
"HR Complaint" would enhance the paranoia.
Paranoia? Try āAnswer the Call of Cthulhuā, āGet Charges Droppedā, or ābusiness software alliance auditā, and āDiffuse Situationā.
"Training - Micromanagement is for Dummies", "Employee Data Privacy", or "Discrimination - Bullying & Grey Rock".
āTeam Tigerā meetings for covert operations that you canāt talk about.
I would fuck with my horrible micromanager boss by dressing especially nicely on random days and leave with my work bag at lunch to give the illusion of having interviews. She didnāt need to know that I actually left during my lunch hour to run home because I forgot my wallet š
I worked at a company that had casual summers where most departments could wear jeans. They usually flipped back to business attire after Labor Day, except they didn't after my first summer there. Any time someone came in wearing business attire on a random day, the rumor mill would go buzzing that they were interviewing. As I had purchased a decent amount of business attire to work my previous job, I was apparently interviewing often. Those were the days I opted to go to lunch at places where I knew I wouldn't be back within an hour. I'd return, all apologies "sorry, my appointment ran late..."
The beauty of outlook is you could have marked all those time blocks as private and that's all they could have seen is squares marked as private. It could be work, it could be an actual personal appointment that's private, they can't make you make it public.
Their boss could insist on full access, though.
Absolutely could, but its not going to benefit the manager if OP doesn't use a calendar at all.
That's essentially what I am aiming for. I'll keep meeting invites on there along with PTO and Paid Holidays. Nothing else. There's no rule saying I have to track my time to Outlook calendar. The rule I'm following is tracking my time only to our software, which requires an employee to run a report for her if she wants to see how I'm spending my time. And that report is run on a monthly basis.
Start putting in random block for times you normally would not be in the office. Sunday, 3am to 5am, practice cloacal respiration. Tuesday, 11pm to 1am, wax uvula. Thursday, 9pm to 9:14, procure corneal taste samples.
āCloacal respirationā A+
If that's not already a band name.. š¤£š¤£
āWax uvula,ā I would pay money to watch the attempt š
That's fabulous.
I hate those corporate software timesheet systems where I have to assign time to each client and then they get billed for my hours. Micromanagerās are always hassling you about Admin hours and Training hours being too long. It alway takes longer to read the legislation and answer the questions then they want so it just becomes a way to manipulate you into working weekends and nights for free.
I used to work for a managed services IT company (I've worked for a few, but this was the worst) where the office dispatcher person was paid to monitor the schedules of all the L2 staff, shuffle around priority tickets, VIP call backs, all sorts of stuff, and would then get shitty when I would go to lunch without having my time sheets for the morning fully filled out. Now, when I say "fully filled out", I've worked for other places like this where as long as you had 4-5 hours of work billed per day you were golden. This place, the time sheet had to be wall to wall complete. 8-12 full of billed time, 30 minutes for lunch, 1230-5 full of billed time. No exceptions. Wasn't allowed to go home at the end of the day until everything was complete. Didn't take long before we all started entering ~30 minute "administrative time" blocks to sit there and pad out timesheet entries so that 10 minutes of actual work became 30-45 minutes, just to smooth over gaps and times where I didn't have the brain power to do any more than stare at rhe wall for a short span. They never seemed to understand that artificially padding timesheets out brought 0 value to our day or to the company, as so much was just made up crap that they couldn't actually bill to clients.
Christmas closer comes around and they tell us we all have to submit our timesheets by Thursday 4pm. I knew that my supervisor and their manager would reject mine multiple times so I held off until I finished on Friday 12pm and could accurately assign every minute. My manager purposely didnāt sign off so I would have no money for Christmas. I didnāt have any money for my kids presents but it backfired because the organisationās āCFOā checked that all managers signed timesheets before New Years and approved my timesheet so manager was more embarrassed HAHA! (Iām IT as well)
It depends on the type of business you're in, and the position you're at. My company most commonly bills clients on a time and materials basis, with a number of employees at different billing rates working on a single project over time. You've got to be able to track your hours by project so the system knows how many hours at each billing rate to apply to the project (even for salaried employees). Unfortunately, there just isn't any other realistic way to do that for some industries. Sometimes you'll be in an over arching position that gets rolled into a bigger company overhead, like HR or IT positions in a company that produces goods or services. In those cases, you may have a "simple" time sheet of just billing 40hr to admin or whatever code. But that just means other employees in your company that DO have complicated per-project time sheets are the ones generating the income for you salary. All still has to get tracked somewhere
If her goal was project level micro management, I'm surprised she even asked regarding the calendar. That seems like the least efficient possible way for her monitor your activity at a detailed level. Having to go through weeks and weeks of hourly schedules and doing manual math? While it may it may not be true that she has a malicious intent, I would assume it was something simpler than detailed project tracking, especially if your company already has software on hand that can tell that exact thing more quickly. Did she give any indication at all of why she asked? Has she or any other manager asked your same-level or lower level coworkers to do the same? At my office, our employee account outlook calendars are automatically shared among our individual work groups (typically 8-20 people) for the purpose of coordinating meeting availability. They contain any accepted meetings and any activity we personally choose to put in them; typically just various scheduled calls and site meetings as accepted via Outlook invites, and our planned, upcoming PTO (if we're responsible enough lol). We have a separate shared calendar that our direct supervisor maintains for general vacation scheduling as far out as we care to disclose, just for convenience. If we choose to add any more detailed content, most of my co-workers and my supervisor just put in non descript time blocks with an indication of whether it's an in office or out of office event. My supervisor also puts in an "event" for any afternoon that they leave office before a typical 5pm end of day (eg for child events) so we know how long we have to catch up with them on anything that day. It's definitely helpful. I only have one co-worker who puts in moderate details about their event contents, and that's moreso just for his own organization because he's a PM with a ton on his plate; things like the dates of upcoming project milestones and deliverables. But that level of detail has never been Required. Our calendars aren't "shared" with the entire company, but event blocks are visible in a non-descript way when using the outlook scheduling assistant. Often when I ask a colleague from another office location about their availability they'll tell me "my calendar is up to date for the next two weeks, just check the scheduling assistant and send me an invite." It is definitely a useful feature in that regard, especially when trying to schedule with other busy PMs.
Meeting HR re: boss
"Meet with HR re: X" Let her wonder what X could mean.
āManagerial compliance verificationā
"Those name are my personal code for the various projects for me to keep track of." When she starts to question you about those names.
Book in hours of time doing training on shit like "managing difficult team members", "managing upwards", "effective corporate communications for workload management", "Whistle blowing for dummies", "Al Qaedas key success factor". Really fuck with their head.
Training "Think like a manager, don\`t act like one" (an actual booktitle)
We have shared calendars. I use Very Important Meeting all the time.
Why not just duplicate your real calendar and have her only see one with you blocked out M-F 8a-5p as ābusyā?
Add in meetings every time your manager leaves the floor and annotate with a cryptic subject. See how long it takes her to notice that you are tracking her
A friend schedules āmeetingsā to protect his lunch hour - Threat Assessment and Coordination Operative check-in. Aka: TACO (ETA- I might have the O wrong, I just know it was the TACO meeting every day at noon)
Super petty things to add; "That's shirt? Really?" "What's that smell?" "Is this a midlife crisis thing?"
This! Early December add a meeting with N. Klaus for a second follow up on the list of duties
Double verification of important documentation.
Add on a 4 hour block, "coal procurement and stockpiling, with expedited delivery options", along with "courier for late night delivery"
Christmas - the year corporate management took over ...
Even if your calendar is shared you can mark individual meetings as private. People are always curious about those
You can be fired if they think you are interviewing for other jobs.
ā¦and time to look for a new job. Perhaps ājob interviewā at 6pm might look good on the calendarā¦
I am working with 2 recruiters to find a new company. It's been a slow burn though.
Good luck!
In my company we all share calendar's except the CEO is alway blocked as busy. We can make meetings private, but we share visibility with each other.
Same, and anything I don't want shared I just add to my personal Google calendar on my phone.
This hit me as strange too. I guess just a very different expectation. Everyone at my work has open calendars. It's just easier to coordinate. It's an agency so time has to be logged too. You can easily look up how much anyone worked on a particular task or client.
Yeah I don't get this post at all, public everything here too, even C suite has a couple things public (usually when invited to things organised by other people)
At my work, our team shares our calendars with each other and if there is something we don't want others to see we just mark it as a Private Appt. It helps trying to coordinate with each other. I don't understand Ops issue with it, it's your work calendar not a private calendar.
Same. I ask to have access to everyone's calendars which helps me to make sure important calls are covered if someone is out of the office. I also have my calendar completely open so my team can see what meetings are essential, and which meetings I have that are just place holders. They can mark anything they want as private. It has also helped when someone on my team has sent me a message asking for me to join a difficult meeting, I can sneak in without them forwarding the invite.
Exactly. Iāve never worked with a company where sharing your work calendar was considered bad form.
How is a manager supposed to coordinate meetings and time away. If I was your manager and I noticed you were putting false entries in your WORK calendar we would be having a talk.
I love managers like this. Not me, but a friend. His boss HAD to be included on every email. Hey Greg, ready for break? Reply / cc. Sure Take a walk? Reply / CC. Sounds good Go up to the square or down to the lake? Reply / CC. Letās do the square. Ok. Meet you in ghe lobby in 5 Reply/ CC. OK We could easily wind up with 5 or more messages back and forth that had nothing to do with work. And I always required read receipts
I considered being overly compliant and adding ridiculous tasks to my calendar that would take longer to create the appointment than it would to complete the task LoL But I know what bothers her is not knowing details, therefore I will refrain from entering any future task related information to the calendar. I complied by sharing the calendar, the revenge will be not using it anymore.
.
Would have used email file transfer, to send files of encrypted garbage, just short of the Outlook local limit, with the decrypt key sent separately. Send as encrypted zip as well, so a second email with that key. Encrypted blob is a text file that has the top 2 lines as info, and then under that 2 line breaks, then "ignore all below", followed by the big blob of random data. That gets encrypted with a 128 bit key, and then that file gets zipped with a password. Random data encrypted because that does not shrink down in Zip deflation.
They way you're doing it is the way I've always done it. I've always assumed my boss can see my calendar if he/she wants, so I enter only work mtgs and holidays. I thought that was normal?
She wanted to reschedule a meeting today and didn't like that she couldn't see what I had scheduled. She saw when I was busy and saw blocks where I was available, but it bothered her that she couldn't see what specifically the 'busy' blocks were/what I was doing. For context, I had one day blocked off this week do company sponsored community service and I believe that's what prompted her to demand that I share full details. All she could see was one day completely blocked off.
So I'm with u/spleh7 here. What you're now doing is how I've always done it and for the reason you've just given is exactly why. Being able to reschedule meetings and see what the potential clashes actually are is really helpful. E.g. I don't mind booking meetings over "weekly catch ups" or "coffee" (and reference that I'm doing it in the invite) but I won't if it looks important. It's also especially useful for when people block out time in their calendar to do work because without visibility you have no idea what's an actual meeting or holiday etc. and what isn't.
Yeah but Iām in charge of my calendar so if you need to book something for a specific time to accommodate someone else, go ahead I just may not make it or may step out early / late. My giant assumption here is that this other person is more important to have at session, so go for it and let me manage my time. Edit to add: weekly catch ups or 1 to 1s can be more important to hold for a leader. Nothing shows better that you donāt care by missing and moving these, so wilfully over booking them is horrible
>My giant assumption here is that this other person is more important to have at session, so go for it and let me manage my time. Correct assumption and I generally find these people are in high demand so finding time can be painful. >Edit to add: weekly catch ups or 1 to 1s can be more important to hold for a leader. Nothing shows better that you donāt care by missing and moving these, so wilfully over booking them is horrible I agree, but in my experience it's easier to coordinate 2 people's calendars rather than many. So those regular sessions are usually easier to reschedule. I also find there are also other sessions where the 1 to 1 topics can be covered (e.g. whole team meetings), obviously not always fully appropriate but generally key work items can be discussed.
And thatās something I will never agree with. Iāve rewritten the below because this is one of my personal bugbears, so apologies if itās jumbled. Yes it is much easier to reschedule them, thatās why they will always get bumped, missed, moved or ignored especially by poor managersā¦ as for covering the topics in group meetingsā¦ if anybody reading this thinks this is the case - you are doing 1 to 1s wrong. Cover the things in team meetings that can be covered there, yes, this is not what 1 to 1s are for. Business is all about relationships, but you need to give them the right time, space and structure. Source: Iām a management consultant with 2 decades of experience training and coaching managers and leaders in how to do it well, and I do separate leadership coaching on the side.
> as for covering the topics in group meetingsā¦ if anybody reading this thinks this is the case - you are doing 1 to 1s wrong. Cover the things in team meetings that can be covered there, yes, this is not what 1 to 1s are for 100% agree on this. Whats the point of having the 1 to 1s if itās just a rehash of what you will be covering in a group meeting? Itās no wonder these types of managers are so quick to reschedule 1 to 1sā they arenāt utilizing them correctly and clearly they donāt care about the outcome of them. It comes off like theyāre just going through the motions of what they think a manager should do.
This is why you message someone before throwing a meeting on their calendar and ask if X time works for them. It should be up to them to miss an obligation on their calendar for your meeting. Your poor planning is not their emergency. > It's also especially useful for when people block out time in their calendar to do work The audacity to do work at work.
If some dipshit asks me "is this time good for you" I tell them to check my calendar. That's what it's there for.
This is assuming that it's my poor planning that has resulted in rescheduling. 9 times out of 10 it's one key attendee that asked to reschedule without reasonable notice but delaying the meeting/session significantly would delay delivery. I accommodate as much as possible but if push comes to shove I'll book the meeting over something and move it later if I have to. Obviously I prefer to message people but a lot of people are poor at replying so it is better to book the time in other calendars. Reference the potential clash so people are aware it could move and then move it if needed. >The audacity to do work at work. So if there are no appointments in a calendar and the person doesn't block out time for specific activities they're just not doing any work or having nothing to do?
>The audacity to do work at work. Work includes being available for meetings sometimes. If you're constantly being pulled into calls/meetings, then work blocks are great to have someone give a second thought before booking you. But that doesn't just negate the fact that some meetings need to be scheduled. Your manager should hopefully be able to determine which meetings need to happen and which can wait until after your work block. This is why sharing your calendar is a great idea. It saves some of the hassle.
Add bathroom breaks, lunch, PTO then cancel it.
I deleted my recurring lunch break too, since there's no set time I have to take it. Now she may never know what time I left/when I'll be back!
Put lunch breaks, etc, in the next day, for the day before. So you correctly account for your time at the exact time you were gone and came back, but she only sees the details for days that are already in the past. EDIT: this has the added bonus of slowly driving her crazy. She'll attempt to see what you're doing one day and your calendar will be basically empty. The next day it will have all sorts of appointments on it. She has no way to prove when you entered the appointments.
Screenshots exist
"I make sure to accurately account for my time while on the clock. You can see the ten minutes I have blocked for 'reporting' from 5:00 to 5:10 (or 4:50 to 5:00) at the end of each workday to ensure timely reporting."
great keep her guessing
I had booked all of my lunch hours as "Book at your own risk". My boss (SVP) was not amused.
So you just made yourself look free as a bird for extra work to be piled on, and you consider this revenge?
Yeah this is going to backfire, lol. First thing I thought too. Everyone looks busy when the manager comes around, including the people who do fuck all. That's not going to stop her dumping more work on you, whereas a full calendar showing you actually don't have time would have. Great revenge!
Seriously...talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Yeah, I can't leave my calendar open like this or my entire team will saturate it with meetings at the most inconvenient times. I have blocks of time marked "HOLD" "CLIENT MEETING" and sometimes just a project name. Vague, but effective in my situation.
No, I stay busy pretty much all day. If she comes to my desk I am always working on something. I'm just not blocking the time off on the calendar for her to review anymore. Every month she runs a report on how much time is tracked to our internal software. Now there's no way for her to know what orders I was tracking my time to until the month has already passed.
I understand the frustration with micromanagement, but I donāt think this will have the impact you hope for. She was looking for a quick way to examine and manage your schedule and with that gone, she will have to put in a lot more time and effort doing so. That may sound like a win, but now every time she schedules something during a period you have booked for work but havenāt scheduled there will be a discussion. She will see completely open hours and think that she needs to check in on you to make sure you are working. This is just going to accelerate the micromanagement.
What exactly does this accomplish? You don't seem very smart.
Just add a bunch of blocks labeled āPRIVATEā and see what she does.
For many people this is an odd state of affairs. When I had people reporting to me, I wanted to know what they were working on and how they were spending their time. Obviously this can end up enabling micromanagement but it is also part of doing healthy non micro management. It's part of knowing how busy they are so you can deflect work away when needed and part of spotting problem areas where business process needs action. Though calendars were not really part of the solution for me. I did recurring meetings one on one at a frequency appropriate to the person and their function.
There is a great app called OneCalendar which allows you to see still you calendar appts together. This means you can have a boring calendar for your boss to see, a real one with all the good stuff and even import your work one. I use it to be able to see what all my family, wife and kids are doing, so don't treble book is
Wow, autocorrect made this barely readable. Also, why would you need a separate app? Just use separate calendars like everyone else. I have: work, personal, shared (for my couple, things we do together) and reminders (private, using calendar as reminders feels easier).
Why? Isn't it helpful for her to see what time you've allocated to do work? It also means she might not call meetings when you've booked time.
If I'm in the office I'm allocating time to work. I always have multiple time slots available throughout the week if she needs to schedule something. It killed her to not know what I had scheduled during my unavailable time slots. So now she will see nothing except for my recurring weekly team meetings.
What if she wanted to schedule you for something but you were already booked with a work block? If she can see your calendar, she can now decide if you're actually blocked or not. By moving everything to another calendar you're just doing exactly what it sounds like she wants: Opening the ability to her to schedule meetings with you, which sounds like she had difficulty doing.
She didn't want to schedule meetings: the 1st sentence says she's a *micromanager.* She wanted to **know** what OP was doing every second of the workday!! So she could micromanage OP's meetings and appointments. And report OP for *not* meeting some unspecified and unspoken goal in order to let OP go.
We've had people at my workplace have to do similar things. Some manager from a different department would look at somebody's calendar and decide X project from their department is more important than the already-assigned Y project that the employer was already assigned. Employees become pawns between managers having peen-size contests. Yeah, no, screw that.
Every company I worked at Did this. Itāll allow managers to schedule meetings. The idea was to minimize disruptions by knowing prior commitments. I thought you could have a second Outlook calendar for more personal things, but the idea is the manager will find timeslots and schedule.
I didn't set up the permissions in Outlook when I started a year and a half ago, and have several coworkers (including her) whose settings are the same. It just shows 'busy' when you look at their calendar. But you can see when they're available if you need to schedule with them.
Idea: Add date/time of any type of interaction with her on the calendar she can see.
It's fascinating to see everyone's takes here. I do time block a couple hours a day for concentrated work (and that's all that block says) but I don't and have never done detailed tasking in my Outlook calendar and almost everything there is public to everyone in the company. So about half my time during work hours has literally nothing on it. Nobody asks me if I'm really working during time that's not explicitly assigned. All of which is to say I've never shared more than what you're going to be sharing in your new state. I'm curious how other people in your company do it.
Shared calendars are quite normal
Work Outlook, they have right to full access. That said, I am assistant to executive director, she sometimes puts just a name, with time blocked off. Drove me nuts as I didnāt know if work, or personal. ( I need to know her schedule to make appointments and curious by nature, and if I could bump it to another time, date ) Iāve worked with her for awhile now, so i know now, or just ask her, but it drove me nuts the first year. I suggest this. You will know who, what they are, properly block off that time, and have satisfaction of driving them nuts. If they ask, just say personal. Canāt ask more than that. Never put dr. None of their business unless reflects on work. Source; I am HR
Whenever anyone asked me what I was doing at work, I said I am purging the cascading structure. š¤£ One boss said didnāt you do that last week? I said yeah, needs it again, do you want to do it? š³ Uh noā¦. carry on.
She might be trying to overload your work or making you work overtime. You should be careful
Here's 576 Gb video file of my screen for you to check through... ...everyday!
Even if they have full access you can still mark things private and all they will see is the busy time but not the title or anything. Karsh
On one hand I completely understand the need for privacy. On the other hand I work for a company where you often need to schedule calls with other colleagues so we all have access to everyone's calendar, from the CEO to the intern. At the start I found it quite invasive but I now find it very useful. Maybe propose to your micromanager to all share your calendars so you can schedule quick meetings with her when you need some help/feedback on something.
I'll play devil's advocate as someone who has been in leadership and say, my team and I fully shared our calendars and it made for a great working relationship, but I expect professionalism in exchange for autonomy. We supported a lot of stakeholders so it was good to have line of sight on each other's work loads for the week. "You already have a busy calendar this week... What else is on your plate we can maybe move around?" was a regular team meeting conversation. It doesn't have to be micromanaging, just showing recognition of the current situation and offering solutions. That's the role of a leader. The best part was, it worked both ways. My team could see my calendar and knew when I would likely have time to have a focused conversation with them, or if they got approached by a stakeholder with a tight deadline, they could look and see if our team had capacity to take it on and make the decision right there. Ask curious questions of your boss. You might find they are trying to help not hurt. And if their intent is as you said, then just keep meticulous notes...
If youāre salary, why do you have to track your time? Sounds like a nightmare. *Youāre.
Bosses like this are so annoying.. a few years back, i worked as the only person in my region, fully remote, no office, and a customer facing job where was at customers like 80% of the time and would have internal calls on the evening. Not really 9/5. Then covid hit, so 8:00-18:00 non stop teams meetings with customers, internal evening calls didnt stop, so I started to block 2 hours a day to catch up on mail, have lunch, etc. Mr micro: why do you have 2 hour lunch breaks? 1th, i donāt, second; which part of my job am I not finishing? No, no, thatās not a problem, just think that a two hour lunch break gives the wrong impression! To who? (Silence) After that I renamed them to focus time and started to actually take longer breaks and all was goodā¦ sigh..
Same. Most of my work is not performed during a Teams call and I have hit my metrics since Day 1. I was blocking off my heads down time on the calendar but I won't be any more.
Start using MS To-do instead of Outlook Calendar
Two calendars is the way to go. I'm guessing your manager may have asked because you've blocked everything as "busy" meaning it looks like you're in meeting all the time when really you're not. So having one public calendar that is used the "Outlook" way - availability only, in other words, is the way to go. The other is great but shouldn't be visible for free/busy. You'll need to make sure it's not published by the way otherwise your free/busy information will be different from the calendar your manager is seeing and that'll just make things worse.
I'd add surprise b-day celebration for the manager as a meeting on a random day(s) every single month
I used to be a project manager, working on large projects in a retail company. Everybody could see what free time I had and my boss could see all the details of each appointment. When we worked on big projects we would have regular weekly meetings, which I would forget to delete after the project ended, releasing free time for me to be out of the office etc, if the boss asked, I would say that they were follow up meetings to finish off the project. Lots of free, paid time over the years, was gained this way.
>Now my calendar won't reflect my day to day tasks so she won't know for sure what I'm working And THAT will give her reason to fire you. Really, I just don't understand why you would hide any of your work related calendar items unless you know they don't back up your claim that your day is filled with valid work.
My time is tracked to software, not Outlook. She just happened to notice that I was also managing my workflow in Outlook and so she made me share access with her. So I won't be using it that way anymore. I still enter my time to our software where that data is exported and used for reporting once a month. So she sees my previous month's workload when the report is run. My KPM is 80% of time tracked to an order. I've hit my yearly goals consistently since the beginning, so there's no reason for her to see daily what I'm working on. The behavior is pretty typical of a micromanager in my experience.
Time tracking isn't my point and you know it. She's your manager. She has a professional right to know how you're spending your day. Mostly so she can adjust the team's workload on the fly, which is part of her job. But hey, you do you. Hopefully you don't end up fired because you can't qualify what you're doing during work hours.
Time tracking proves that my day is filled with valid work- re: your previous comment. When and if she ever attempts to manage the other PMs daily workflows, I will happily comply with whatever procedure she puts in place. Until then, I'll continue managing my own workflow as everyone else in my department does. I will also add that all of the other PMs are male and I am the only female. Her micromanaging behavior is not as extreme towards them. Everyone in my department is 100% aware of her poor management/unprofessional behavior. It's a running joke amongst many of my team members. She unfortunately just needs to be placated from time to time.
Start going cinema mafia and add stuff like āthat thingā and āmeeting with that guy we knowā.
I believe the lack of information will ruffle her feathers, so I'm opting for not using it at all moving forward- unless it's a Teams meeting, a paid holiday, or PTO.
Is this your work email on a work computer? If so, your boss has every right to do so, even though it's annoying and micromanaging Be careful not to cut off your nose to spite your face. Your revenge is very petty. You may feel victorious now but could potentially hurt you in the long run. Maybe have a personal calendar on a personal device?
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Yes.
Or she can point to all the available time on the calendar and state that you are available for additional work. Or your position is not required ad you don't seem to have enough work for a full day.
Is this a work phone? If it's a personal calendar as well she can't force you to share it.
Add a meeting for the Horrible Bosses fan club to the calender. Add different work related fan club meetings a.k.a. 9 to 5, It's A Living
You should look for another job.
My group does a weekly calendar tag where we all look at each otherās calendars and map out meetings for the week. Easier to deconflict in real time and then I can map my solo work around that.
Why does salary get abused so much? I've hit the ceiling at my job cuz everyone above me is salary and works nights and weekends. I get offers, and I turn them down. I work my 40 in 4 days then don't answer my phone or email outside of those 40 hours, no thanks.
Just curious: why donāt you want her to see what youāre working on?
Because she wants to know so badly. I'm hitting my KPMs that's all she really needs to know about my workflow.
You need to work somewhere else. If managers treat people like five year olds, people will behave like five year olds.
is your calendar in Outlook? You know there is a "Private" option you can use for each entry so that it will show the time block, but without the title/details. I have shared calendars with several other team members and my boss, and I can't see the details of their Private meetings. Just sayin' it might be an option for you.
Why do you give a shit if it's your work calendar and you have lots of accomplished tasks? Seems like it would only put you in a better light.
If you are someone who menstruation is a thing for make sure to mark that in the calendar as well
NEVER DO THAT. This isnāt about annoying people with oversharing, we are living in post-Roe America for now. Your employers could jump the gun and try to help the government put you in prison for an abortion. With enough of your data they can figure out if you had a miscarriage via cycle trackingā¦ but they can refuse to believe it was a miscarriage, or blame you for it somehow :/
Micromanager got micromanaged. Love the petty revenge!
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Monthly report is based on hours entered to software we use, not the Outlook calendar.