A Clock That Counted the Wrong Work

The city translation office introduced time-tracking software to understand its workload. It counted active keyboard use and labelled long pauses as idle time. Translator Emil appeared unusually unproductive in the first report. He had spent much of that week reading complicated source documents, checking terminology in printed books and speaking with colleagues about ambiguous passages.

His manager knew the report was incomplete, but senior staff wanted comparable figures across the department. Emil could improve his score by keeping a document open and typing unnecessary notes. A colleague showed him how to avoid being marked idle. He declined, not because he was unusually virtuous, but because maintaining a convincing performance of work sounded like additional unpaid work.

Instead, he asked the manager to observe one translation from beginning to end. She watched him spend twelve minutes considering a single sentence whose meaning affected several later paragraphs. The software recorded almost none of that effort. He then showed her a rapidly typed draft full of errors. On the activity chart, it looked excellent. She laughed before admitting that the demonstration made her uncomfortable.

The office kept the software for recording project start and finish times, but stopped using keyboard activity to compare staff. Senior managers still demanded explanations for delays, and Emil still had to provide them. The new reports were not magically fair. They simply stopped treating silence at a keyboard as evidence that nothing was happening. Emil returned the printed dictionary to his desk, where it remained entirely invisible to the system and regularly useful to him.