I hate logging stats at the office...

Stats, as in statistics, where you have to log how many work units you complete in an hour. This forms a way for the management to monitor the productivity of their employees. Since it runs on an honor system, I am skeptical of the accuracy.

I am not a particular fan of the whole system though. I, as an individual employee, find it an extra chore to log stats every hour on the hour. And, in the interest of being more productive, I find that it slows me down and breaks my work rhythm.

I am currently chasing the personal best (highest number work units completed in a day) of my colleagues at the bank and I find that I am not quite improving. They have the advantage of familiarity of the work and of having had proper training sessions. I just got 2 weeks of having been shown how stuff works and it has been 'monkey see, monkey do' ever since.

But, I understand the need for it and how it helps planning and work distribution. It is not feasible to work on a guesstimate. And, it makes sense to have the hard numbers. Say that you have a team of 5 on a manufacturing line that needs to assemble 100 widgets a day. You kinda need the numbers to map out the capability of your team and monitor how many widgets they can comfortably achieve in a day.

And with those figures, you can then allocate the work load accordingly. I'm a big fan of team work and the idea of load-balancing among the different production lines and teams in the factory.

Furthermore, if you log and track each individual employee's stats, you are in a better position to plan for contingencies. Say, you have John Employee who is able to comfortably assemble 20 widgets a day. That means, on the days that John calls in sick, the other 4 team members must be able to pick up the slack and complete an extra 5 widgets each. This is assuming if the team is to make the daily production quota.

And, when John decides to take off to the Bahamas on his annual leave, it would be better to hire another guy. This is as not to burn out your team by having them pick up the slack...

... every day...

... for the next 4 weeks.