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Take longer to complete your tasks and spend time posting like me?
Are you working in a service/contracting company? Sometimes the issue is with the company's agreement with the client, as in the services agreement specifies X number of hours per contractor at Y rate, etc., not just "we agree to deliver you the thing by such and such date." It can cause weird patterns. Same is true if similar guidelines are handed down from corporate HQ. It's entirely possible you are being given an impossible task so they have a reason to fire you, but I wouldn't rule out overall structural defects in the way work is managed, leading to a situation where it becomes impossible for individuals to actually do their jobs.
Yeah, sounds familiar. It's a tough situation. There's really no way around it that doesn't have some risks. If you're honest with your boss, you risk being fired for sticking your neck out. If you try and inflate hours too much, you risk getting fired for lying. You do nothing, you risk getting fired for "underperforming." In a perfect world, you just point out what you just said to me and let management figure it out, but that's not likely to make you any friend in the long run. I'd start shopping around for jobs, not because you're for sure going to be fired, but it would be good to know if you have options. Remember, your company won't reward you for loyalty. If your job becomes redundant/unnecessary, you'll be fired no matter how well you do. Just make sure you don't give them a reason to fire you with cause.
This is a classic one-two combo of getting people to basically work a ton for free. You stress them out and starve them for work on one end, but keep strict expectations regarding minimum quotas on the other.
How the fuck am I supposed to log all the hours they require out of thin air
The part you're missing, and rightfully so, is the part where you "take the initiative" or "go drum up more business" or "put on your productivity hat" or whatever. It's that "extra" that they will try and jam in there. It's never enough to just do the job and be done. This is basically PMC hell.
The result is you get employees that either (1) put in tons of unpaid labor just to generate the appearance of a full day's work or (2) lie to the economic benefit of the employer by inflating your time. They get the benefit of you lying without any of the blowback if it is discovered.
I work with a similar time tracking mindset. Luckily my employers added a "Nothing to do because of COVID" task for when there is literally nothing to do.
I would recommend you find a personal project to work on that is tangentially related to benefitting your employer, like a fancy spreadsheet that streamlines part of your job, or documenting a workflow, than using that as a resume item to help you find a better job.
I'm in sort of the same situation. Due to covid there isn't the same amount of work for me. So I inflate my timesheets as much as possible. I'm lucky to have a few low-priority internal projects where nobody has bothered to do estimates and where there isn't a client to get mad about the bills. I'm logging a lot of bullshit hours on those.
I hate this. I'm afraid that I'll get caught and that someone will notice the tremendously low output of all the hours I log. All I want to do is having a reasonable amount of sensible work to fill my day with and knowing that I've done what is expected of me.
