Timesheets are such a waste of time

Timesheets are the bane of the Indian IT Industry
They have evolved to a point when the have ceased to serve any meaningful purpose other than present some meaningless numbers to senior management.

We have been told countless times that it is a sin not to keep one's timesheets up to date.There is barrage of emails from PMO to keep our timesheets up to date. The nagging is so persistent that our managers literally plead with us to put in our timesheets.

I however find the ritualistic update of the number 8 in some five meaningless boxes every week to be such a criminal waste of time and effort of multiple people at least in a development project.

For one, the manager has to prepare a detailed plan as to what each and ever person in his team of five or fifty is doing every hour that makes up the forty hour week.
Imagine doing this for a fifty member team every week, activity takes up so much time of the manager that the manager starts being deviant ,vague and starts making up tasks that take the entire duration of the project to complete. Here is a sample
i. Development of code
ii. Testing
iii. Code review
iv. Build management

these are not task types, but tasks themselves marked to begin at any point but will only end along with the end of the project which is probably two years away.

Added to this plight is the problem of reconciling MPPs with that of the online system that maintains the timesheets.For, the senior management always wants to see both online reports , MPPs and additional dozen Exel sheets along with a PPT on the status of the project.

The entire team thus begins entering timesheet of 8 hours against the five or six days of the week against the meaningless tasks created for them.

It has become so stupidly ritualistic and I'm surprised that most senior management personnel do not realize that the system is being subverted and is not serving any purpose and keep insisting on them being kept up to date.

To the credit of the timesheet systems, they have tremendous amount of features in them and could throw up a great deal of light on who is doing what, but if it were only simpler to use.