This is starting off to be a humdinger of a bad year, and certain things go hand in hand with that, particularly if you manage people and a business. You know what I am talking about: the budget cuts, furloughs, layoffs and other such measures that seem to proliferate when the economy goes south.

We’ve already seen a lot of that in 2009, and there is surely a lot more to come, but there’s something else that seems to come out of the woodwork when times are tough: terribly shortsighted people practices and bad business ideas. In other words, it’s time for Stupid Management Tricks, bad economy version.

As I told you when I started this Business of Management blog feature last October, the inspiration behind Stupid Management Tricks is CBS late-night talk show host David Letterman, and  although Letterman may have stupid human and pet tricks on his show, they’re generally lighthearted and a good laugh for everyone. Stupid Management Tricks, on the other hand, have the opposite effect. They’re the result of brain-dead management practices that are shortsighted and regressive. They are only laughable in the sense that only an idiot would think they would work.

I know there will be a lot of these to write about this year, but here’s one I found today, and it has to do with an old favorite of many overly controlling and obsessive managers: the productivity memo.

The South Bend Tribune, a newspaper in northern Indiana, is now demanding that all reporters file a productivity memo at the end of the evening (or in some cases, the beginning of the next day) that details just what the reporter worked on all day. Now, this is not a new concept. As a longtime newspaper editor (I was the top editor for Gannett at statewide newspapers in Montana and Hawaii), I know that you sometimes need to get a fix on just how people are spending their time and whether they could be more efficient.

But what South Bend Tribune assistant managing editor Virginia Black is asking for is far more than that. If you read her memo, you’ll see that she wants a level of detail about how reporters are working that is so over the top that it defies logic or reason. Productivity will suffer as the writers get overly focused on tracking what they do, and morale will be the next thing to take a hit when the editors use this information to micromanage the staff and club people over the head with the details.

I’ve had people working for me track their work at times, but usually for a few days or a week. When I’ve done it, though, it was meant to provide a snapshot as part of the ongoing management improvement process. It was never meant to be an institutionalized part of the job itself.

That’s the problem with productivity memos. In the long run, they actually can hinder productivity. People get too caught up in tracking what they do instead doing the work itself. This is especially true when it comes to creative endeavors like writing and editing, where there is a constant tradeoff between quantity and quality. In fact, I would dare say that the higher the quality of a creative endeavor, the harder it is to measure just what exact steps it took to produce that exemplary work.

This isn’t true for all fields, of course, but writing a newspaper story is not an assembly-line process or a linear work exercise. And it’s a scary proposition when you have managers who don’t seem to understand, or appreciate, that very basic fact.

So productivity memos like the ones the reporting staff of the South Bend Tribune is being asked to produce are stupid and shortsighted. And they are just yet one more sign that we are in a terribly difficult economic period, one where idiotic, unchallenged management thinking like this is alive and well, regardless of what negative impact it may actually have on the workforce.

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