In retrospect the first few years of my career were the cowboy coding era. We came to work, worked on tasks that we knew supported major issues or deadlines and got shit done.
Then agile ate the world and we had to create a report that showed everything the team did every 2 weeks. Shortly thereafter management decided they should get an email with a weekly activity report (WAR) Word document from each individual, detailing personal accomplishments every week.
More recently, coinciding with my employer's move to remote work, it became a daily activity report in a Confluence page. And just now, the daily activity report requirement has become even more granular, not just listing tasks worked or meeting attended, but assigning hours to each.
I'm not sure why this bothers me - I'm being paid and expected to produce work, but it also feels more and more like someone is trying to catch us out.
I'm reminded of a time when I booked a mobile mechanic to fix a couple of issues on my car. The bill ended up having 3 hours of labor, although I know the mechanic was here for 2 hours (I didn't push back because I assume 1.5 hours was standard for each task and I was fine with the overall price). Now I'm not going to do my personal timekeeping like that, but I can't help but think if I continually have to make several activity entries per day, I'm going to make some honest mistakes where I forget about task X or poorly guess how long phone call Y was.
Is this standard these days - are other employers asking for activity logs that are this granular?