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When 70–90% of a PM’s time goes into dashboards and spreadsheets, leadership suffers. Discover how reporting overload quietly erodes delivery impact.
There’s a quiet frustration a lot of project managers don’t say out loud.
You didn’t get into this field to update spreadsheets.
You got into it to drive delivery. To align teams. To move initiatives forward.
And yet… somehow 70–90% of your time is spent:
At some point, you start asking:
Am I managing projects — or managing reporting?
Reporting is necessary.
Executives need visibility.
Stakeholders need updates.
Governance requires traceability.
But somewhere in many organisations, reporting stops being a byproduct of delivery — and becomes the main event.
You spend hours polishing a dashboard.
Meanwhile, the actual risk conversations are happening in Slack threads you don’t have time to fully process.
The irony?
The more time you spend maintaining reporting artifacts, the less time you have to influence the project itself.
Let’s be clear: updating spreadsheets isn’t neutral work.
It carries hidden costs:
When PMs become data clerks, strategic oversight suffers.
And that cost rarely shows up on a KPI.
There are a few structural reasons this creeps in.
Data lives in Jira. Or Azure DevOps. Or Smartsheet. Or Excel. Or PowerPoint.
None of it talks cleanly to each other.
So the PM becomes the integration layer.
Manual reconciliation becomes the norm.
Leadership often prefers:
Even if the source of truth already exists elsewhere.
So the PM reformats the same information repeatedly — just to meet expectations.
When trust is low, reporting volume increases.
More documentation.
More status validation.
More granular updates.
Not because it improves delivery — but because it reduces perceived risk.
The result?
Administrative drag.
Here’s where it gets dangerous.
When most of your time is reactive reporting, your role slowly shifts.
You stop leading.
You start servicing.
Instead of shaping outcomes, you document them.
And over time, that erodes job satisfaction — even if the project is technically “on track.”
At its core, project management is about:
Those are high-leverage activities.
They require presence, judgment, and time.
They don’t happen when you’re buried in formatting cells and updating conditional formatting rules.
If 80% of your role is reporting, it’s worth stepping back and asking:
Is this governance architecture actually helping delivery — or just creating visibility theatre?
Visibility should support decisions.
If it doesn’t drive action, it’s overhead.
You can’t eliminate reporting.
But you can reduce unnecessary friction.
Minimize duplicate trackers. If two systems contain the same data, one of them is probably redundant.
Avoid custom decks for every stakeholder group unless absolutely necessary.
Integrations, exports, API connections — even partial automation can claw back hours weekly.
If reporting volume is materially impacting delivery capacity, surface that as a risk. It is one.
A project manager’s value isn’t measured by the number of spreadsheets updated.
It’s measured by:
If the bulk of your energy goes into maintaining artifacts instead of influencing outcomes, the organisation is underutilizing the role.
And that’s not a personal productivity issue.
It’s a structural design issue.
Spreadsheets aren’t the enemy.
But when they consume the majority of a PM’s time, something’s misaligned.
Reporting should illuminate reality.
Not replace leadership.
If you feel like you’re spending more time updating cells than moving the project forward, you’re not alone.
The question isn’t “How do I get faster at spreadsheets?”
It’s “Why is this much manual reporting necessary in the first place?”
That’s where the real conversation starts.
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