A coworker has turned our open office calendar into her personal surveillance tool.
By @hankmm · Work
A peer on my team audits everyone's public work calendars and demands line-item justifications for any block labeled as focus time. My manager calls it peer accountability, but the entire team is stressed and looking for practical suggestions to shut it down professionally.
The full story
Our corporate office implemented a shared open-calendar policy six months ago, meant to streamline cross-functional project scheduling. Instead, a senior analyst on our floor has weaponized it into an administrative panopticon. Every Monday morning, she audits the departmental calendars and sends out unsolicited direct messages or tags people in public Slack channels questioning their time allocation. Last Tuesday, she scheduled a fifteen-minute sync titled 'Efficiency Alignment' simply to ask why I had three ninety-minute blocks marked 'Deep Work / Focus Time' without specific deliverables hyperlinked in the calendar description. When I pointed out that creative drafting and raw data analysis require uninterrupted stretches of thought, she informed me that vague calendar blocks create an optical illusion of productivity while concealing bandwidth. She does this to several junior associates as well, to the point where people have started padding their schedules with fake vendor meetings and decoy appointments just to deter her scrutiny. My manager prefers a hands-off approach and considers this healthy peer accountability, but the collective morale hit is palpable. We are losing hours every week playing defensive scheduling chess against a colleague who is technically our peer, not our supervisor. I am drafting an agenda for our quarterly operations retrospective and genuinely need suggestions on how to dismantle this surveillance habit professionally without triggering a defensive human resources skirmish.
How people voted
- Bad Move — 25% (16 votes)
- Needs Context — 37% (23 votes)
- Reasonable — 38% (24 votes)
Readers are split: “Reasonable” leads with 38% — 63 votes and 5 comments so far.
What people are saying
@edieliterally — lmaooo
@tannerk — soft.
@violetsorta — Your manager is completely conflict-avoidant and passing the buck so they dont have to manage.
@judekk — start booking fake meetings with the ceo on her calendar lol
@niaish — Had an old coworker do this at my last job until someone put a 4 hour recurring block called 'mind your business' and dared her to question it.
Keep reading
- My coworkers made a 'menu' of prices for bailing on lunch plans.
- My coworkers have started charging cancellation fees for lunch plans.
- My coworker is taking credit for my project and I'm not sure if I should report them.
- I locked the break room creamer in my toolbox over five dollars.
- Mandatory team dinners are just unpaid overtime disguised as appetizers.