Some reports that get written provide vital information to the organization, enabling it to spot trends, identify opportunities, scan for threats, monitor project progress and so on. Some reports have to be written because of legal or regulatory requirements. And some reports get written . . . well, just because they get written.

You know that report that you spend all that time on? You have to gather data from different places. You have to go to meetings to get information. You have to cross-reference different files or databases.

It may be that at the end of all that, nobody reads it.

Somebody on a course I taught recently told me the following story. I have reproduced it here without an ounce of exaggeration. There was a report they used to write and which got sent out to 50 people. They stopped sending it just to see what would happen. One person came to them asking where it was. And that one person was the person who was previously responsible for preparing the same report and so clearly felt some sort of emotional attachment to it.

Again, don’t misquote or misunderstand me. I’m not saying reports aren’t important. But, in my experience, a lot of reports don’t get read.

Project status reports are a great example of this. Each team member spends several hours every week writing a status report explaining what they did on the project. Tasks completed this week. Tasks planned for next week. Percentage complete. Critical issues. You know the kind of thing. Often this is information that the project manager could have found out just by walking around and talking to people. Or at a quick status meeting. If I’m a project manager and I have a choice between my team members working on getting the project done or writing status reports, I know which one I would want them to do.

So the message of this chapter is short and simple. People may read your report and it may provide invaluable information.

Or they may not and it may not. In which case, it’s a waste of your time to be writing it.

If you have any suspicion at all that your report falls into the latter category, there’s only one way to find out. It’s pretty much the same as with meetings. Don’t do it and see what happens.

If the sky falls you have your answer and if the sky doesn’t fall . . . well, you know.

There are a few standard tests for whether people are reading your report or not. The most entertaining is to insert a sentence which reads, ‘If you read this sentence I’ll give you twenty euros/pounds/ dollars’ and then see if anybody comes looking for the money. This isn’t my idea. This is an old idea but the number of people I’ve said this to and who have replied, ‘Yeah, I’ve done that and nobody ever looked for any money from me’.

The second test is to send out last week’s report with the date changed and see what happens. I’ve had somebody tell me that they were doing that for 12 weeks with a weekly report before anybody noticed. At best, such a report should be stopped altogether; at worst, it should only be going out once a quarter.

And finally, the third (and laziest) test. Just stop sending it and see if anybody notices.

Related to all of this is another possibility – that even if the report is necessary, it may not be necessary in its current unwieldy form. (An unwieldy form which has often been around since the Flood and just passed on from one generation to the next.) That giant 50-page tome that you spend so much time assembling every week could perhaps be replaced by something shorter, simpler, snappier and more streamlined – ideally a one-pager.

You might even get some brownie points by doing the streamlining. Just because things have been done a certain way in the past doesn’t mean they always have to be done that way.

IBM used to (and maybe still do, for all I know) have a motto that said ‘Think’. It’s actually not bad advice.