It’s Monday morning.

How many of you are filling out weekly reports?

Why do so many of us have to endure this pain in the 🍑 task?

All weekly reports started from a pure, rational, and meaningful place:

Boss up the food chain wants to review the business thoroughly, and wants to hear from the ground up.

• A subordinate of Boss needs data from her team to inform Boss
• She needs these data to be consistent. She needs the data weekly
• So she creates a form disguised as a report

She asks her lefthand man to create this report (aka fill out this form):

• Lefthand man needs data from his team, consistently, weekly
• So he creates a form disguised as a report and gives to his team

This continues downstream, and now it has reached you.

I call these “Slow Scope Creeps.”

• We carelessly allow the scope of our work creeps into our teams’ scopes.
• These slow scope creeps spread quickly through the org.
• Once they colonise the org, they are extremely hard to remove, because everyone depends on someone to fill out a form.

There is nothing much you can do about it, except one thing:

Boss, before you create another “report,” just think for a sec-

is this one of those “slow scope creeps?”