10 Ways Managers Waste Their Own Time
Picture a maintenance manager spending forty minutes on a Friday afternoon building the weekly report. The numbers come from three different screens and a personal spreadsheet nobody else knows exists. None of that data is new; it already lives in the system somewhere. The time goes to moving numbers from one place to another, not to making any actual decision.
Multiply that by every manager doing something similar every week, and the lost hours add up fast, with very little of them spent on work that actually needs a manager’s judgment. Most of these time-wasters share the same root cause: work that used to require a person now just requires someone to set the system up to do it instead.
10 Habits That Quietly Eat a Manager’s Week
1. Manually Compiling Reports That Should Already Exist
Problem: Every week, the manager pulls data from a few different places (work orders, spreadsheets, memory) and assembles it into a report by hand.
Impact: Hours go into recreating something the system should already produce on its own. That time never shows up as “work” anyone notices.
Fix: Set up standing reports with CMMS reporting, dashboards, and KPIs that update automatically, so compiling a weekly summary stops being a task at all.
2. Chasing Down Work Order Status Instead of Seeing It Live
Problem: To find out where a job actually stands, the manager walks the floor, calls a supervisor, or waits for someone to mention it in passing.
Impact: Getting a simple status update costs minutes that add up across dozens of open jobs every week.
Fix: Make work order status visible in real time inside work order management, so checking in doesn’t require tracking anyone down.
3. Re-Entering Data That’s Already Somewhere Else in the System
Problem: A number already exists in the CMMS, but building a specific report or presentation means typing it again into a spreadsheet or slide.
Impact: Someone enters the same information twice: once into the original record, and again when the manager repackages it for the report.
Fix: Pull data directly from the source instead of retyping it, even if that means adjusting how a report gets built.
4. Approving Routine Requests That Never Needed to Reach a Manager
Problem: Every purchase request, no matter how small or routine, lands in the manager’s queue for sign-off.
Impact: Approving a ten-dollar part takes the same click and context-switch as approving something that actually needs judgment.
Fix: Set approval thresholds that fit your organization’s purchasing controls and segregation-of-duties requirements, so routine, low-cost requests within that policy clear automatically, and manager attention goes to the requests that actually need it.
5. Answering the Same Question From Technicians Repeatedly
Problem: Different technicians ask the manager the same questions (Where’s this part? What’s the status on that PO?) over and over, because the answer isn’t visible anywhere else.
Impact: Each individual answer takes a minute, but multiply that across a week and a team, and it adds up to real time spent being a human lookup table.
Fix: Make the answer visible to the whole team directly, so technicians can check it themselves instead of asking.
6. Reconciling Spreadsheets That Duplicate What the CMMS Already Tracks
Problem: A separate spreadsheet exists for tracking something the CMMS technically already tracks. Usually, it was easier to set up once and nobody’s revisited it since.
Impact: Every update now happens twice, and the two versions inevitably drift apart, so someone has to reconcile them.
Fix: Where the spreadsheet is just duplicating a record the CMMS already owns, build that tracking directly into the CMMS software everyone already uses instead of maintaining two versions of the same truth.
7. Attending Status Meetings That Exist Because Data Isn’t Trusted
Problem: A recurring meeting exists specifically to verbally confirm numbers that theoretically already live in a report somewhere.
Impact: When that’s the meeting’s only real purpose, it’s substituting for trust in the data, and it costs an hour a week that a trusted, accurate report wouldn’t need. Coordination, safety, and priority-setting are different problems and still deserve their own meeting time.
Fix: Fix the data’s credibility problem directly, so the meeting can shrink to actual decisions instead of number-checking.
8. Manually Checking Parts Availability Before Approving Work
Problem: Before approving a job, the manager calls or walks to the stockroom to confirm a part is actually available.
Impact: That confirmation step repeats for every approval, adding a manual detour to a decision the system should be able to answer directly.
Fix: Tie spare parts inventory data to the approval screen itself, so on-hand quantity, reservations, and incoming stock are visible without a separate check. Some judgment calls around substitutes or partial availability will still need a person, but the basic “is it in stock” question shouldn’t.
9. Rebuilding Historical Context Every Time Someone Asks for It
Problem: A director or auditor asks for history on a specific asset or recurring issue. The manager spends time digging back through old records to reconstruct it.
Impact: The same reconstruction work happens every time someone asks, since nothing from the last search is saved for the next one.
Fix: Keep asset and repair history, plus preventive maintenance records, organized and searchable on an ongoing basis, so answering the question takes a search, not a research project.
10. Doing Technician-Level Work Because Delegating Feels Slower
Problem: A manager takes on a hands-on task personally, because explaining it or assigning it through the system feels like it would take longer than just doing it.
Impact: That instinct is sometimes right for a single task. Repeated often enough, it quietly trains the team to route small things to the manager instead of handling them directly.
Fix: Build assignment and instructions into the workflow itself, so delegating a task takes the same effort as doing it, and stops being the slower option.
Where a CMMS Fits Into Getting This Time Back
None of these ten habits are really about laziness or bad time management. They’re about work the system could handle automatically still routing through a person instead. eWorkOrders cuts down on that routing step, so more of a manager’s time goes toward decisions instead of data assembly.
- Reporting and KPIs that update automatically, instead of requiring manual compilation
- Work order status visible live to anyone who needs it, not just whoever asks
- Approval workflows with thresholds, so routine requests clear without manager sign-off
- Asset, inventory, and preventive maintenance history searchable in one place, not rebuilt from memory
- One shared source of truth, so nobody has to maintain a duplicate spreadsheet to see the numbers they need
See how much of your week eWorkOrders can hand back.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is delegating always faster than doing something myself as a manager?
Not always, for a single task. The problem is making that calculation the same way every time. It trains a team to route small decisions to the manager by default, instead of handling them independently.
Why does so much of a manager’s week end up going to administrative work?
Usually because the system was never set up to do that work itself. The more a role depends on manual reporting, status-chasing, and spreadsheet reconciliation, the more of the week goes to tasks a CMMS could handle automatically. Team size and how fully the CMMS is configured both make a big difference.
What’s the first habit worth fixing?
Usually whichever one repeats most often during a typical week. A report someone builds once a month costs less time overall than a status question the manager answers five times a day.
