So, you wanna know about my brush with this “Caden Sorrell” thing? Man, that takes me back. It wasn’t some fancy tool or software, not at first. It was a guy, or at least, the idea of a guy, that one of my old managers got obsessed with.
How It All Started
I remember walking into the office one Monday, and there was this new energy. Or rather, forced energy. Our team lead, bless his cotton socks, had been to some weekend seminar. And guess who the star speaker was? Yep, Caden Sorrell. Suddenly, everything we did was going to be “Sorrell-ized.” That was the term they actually used. I kid you not.
First thing, we all had to sit through these long, rambling presentations. They weren’t even proper training sessions. It was more like someone trying to explain a dream they once had. Lots of buzzwords, very little substance. We were told this Caden Sorrell method was going to revolutionize our workflow, make us ten times more productive, all that jazz. I just remember thinking, “Here we go again.”
The “Practice” Part
Then came the actual “practice.” They handed out these weirdly formatted spreadsheets and told us to track every single minute of our day according to “Sorrell’s Principles of Peak Performance.” It was a nightmare. My day went something like this:
- 8:00 AM – 8:07 AM: Logged into Sorrell tracker.
- 8:07 AM – 8:15 AM: Attempted to understand Sorrell task categorization.
- 8:15 AM – 8:30 AM: Actually started some real work.
- 8:30 AM – 8:35 AM: Interrupted to update Sorrell tracker about starting real work.
You get the picture. We spent more time documenting what we were about to do, or had just done, than actually doing it. The whole thing felt clunky, like trying to run a race while wearing boots made of concrete. My team, we tried. We really did. We’d have these hushed conversations by the water cooler, “How are you logging ‘thinking time’?” or “Does ‘unforeseen debugging’ go under ‘Reactive Synergy’ or ‘Proactive Blockage Mitigation’?” It was a joke, but a sad one because our deadlines didn’t care about Caden Sorrell.
I started keeping my own, simpler to-do list on a sticky note, hidden under my keyboard. That was the only way I got anything meaningful done. The Sorrell spreadsheets? They became works of fiction. We all just filled them in at the end of the day with whatever sounded plausible to keep management off our backs.
What I Took Away
After a few months, the whole Caden Sorrell charade just… fizzled out. Like most of these management fads do. Productivity didn’t magically increase. If anything, morale took a nosedive. Projects got delayed because we were all too busy trying to look busy in the “Sorrell-approved” way. The biggest thing I learned? That there’s no magic bullet. Real productivity comes from clear goals, good tools that actually help, and trusting your team to get the job done, not from forcing some guru’s abstract ideas down everyone’s throat.
I actually left that company not long after. The whole Caden Sorrell episode was just one of many signs that management was more interested in appearing trendy than in actually supporting its people. Last I heard, they were all about “Agile-Waterfall Hybrid Synergies” or some other nonsense. Some things never change, huh?
