I feel you fellow IT brother/sister!
The IT world is chock-full of this garbage, and all it really forces people to do is A. Provide lesser service so that it “takes longer”, inflating their time metrics, and B. Causes people to make shit up, or submit their own BS tickets to make it look like they’re doing stuff to justify their existence.
Ultimately holding people to a metric-based system like this leads to worse service, and make people hate their jobs.
The job I had before my current one, I was site lead for Field Services. Luckily we were sort of a start up/experimental program, so the technician metrics weren’t tracked at all. MAN it was nice. Nobody felt stressed out needing to justify every second of their day, they wound up doing the work in an appropriate amount of time because it didn’t matter how long an individual took (be that long, or short). We only had an SLA to meet for the customer, which was easily hit.
I even took it a step further and didn’t really pay much heed to the corporate timekeeping rules… If someone needed to run an errand or “telework” for a day; fine by me. The company didn’t give anyone sick time, or enough time in general, OR a big enough salary, so they can eat my whole ass. Lo and behold, our section had the lowest MTTR, and highest amount of tickets closed, all with 100% SLA met. Crazy what you can achieve when you treat people like adults and actual human beings instead of soulless automatons.
I’ve treated my hunting clothing with permethrin when we were going to an area that was known to have an extremely heavy tick population. We had a spray bottle of the stuff, and did a thick coating all over our outer gear, and then allowed it to dry. Permethrin is fairly low toxicity for humans & dogs, but absolutely killer for mosquitoes and ticks. Worked like a charm!