My old boss told me I was overthinking the data and she was 100% right

I used to spend hours building complex spreadsheets with tons of formulas for our weekly sales reports. One day my boss just said 'Ray, nobody cares about the fancy calculations, just tell me what sold and what didn't.' So I cut it down to a simple table with three columns and a total at the bottom. Saved me about 4 hours a week once I got used to it. Now I just use basic filters and a quick sort. Has anyone else had a manager call them out on overcomplicating something simple?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_harper25d ago

Oh man, I once spent an entire afternoon building a color-coded report with conditional formatting and nested IF statements for inventory tracking. My boss looked at it for maybe 3 seconds and said "I just need to know what's running low, not a rainbow of possibilities." Felt like a total idiot. Spent way too long on that thing. Now I just do a simple count and a note if something's under 50 units. Cut my time from like 5 hours to maybe 20 minutes. Sometimes the simplest answer really is the right one, I guess.

milam4825d ago

bet the boss would've missed the rainbow if it wasn't there though.

mason_lopez25d ago

Yeah I used to be the same way but honestly that changed my whole view on it.