One senior coworker refuses the tracker, so my inbox has become the project

Our team has a project tracker that everyone uses except one senior coworker.

He sends me direct messages.

“Client approved the change.”

“Move testing to Thursday.”

“I told Finance we would send numbers tomorrow.”

Each message contains something the rest of the team needs to know. I copy it into the tracker, update dates, tag owners, and ask any missing questions. If I do not, the information effectively disappears inside my inbox.

He says the tracker is too slow. He has been with the company for twelve years, knows every client, and moves quickly. Leadership values that. They also value the clean project view I maintain, without acknowledging that part of its cleanliness comes from translating his private messages into shared work.

Last month, I was out sick for two days. He messaged three decisions while I was away. None reached the project team. When a deadline slipped, our manager asked why the tracker was outdated. I showed her the messages and explained that I had not been available to copy them. She said the system needed to be more resilient.

I agreed. Then she asked whether I could create an automation that pulled his messages into the tracker.

The problem is not the software. The problem is that one person has been excused from the team’s communication agreement, and everyone else is expected to build around the exception.

I tried replying to his latest message with, “Please add that decision to the project card so the owners see it.” He sent back a thumbs-up. Two hours later, the card was still unchanged. I added it because the testing team needed the answer.

Every rescue makes the system work and proves that he does not need to change.

I want to stop serving as the bridge, but simply ignoring decisions would affect coworkers and clients before it affected him. My proposed rule is that a decision is not final until the decision-maker records it in the shared tracker or states it in the project channel. I can help him learn the process once. I will not continue transcribing routine messages.

Would you enforce that rule immediately, ask the manager to own the exception, or move his messages into a shared channel and make the missing record visible? How do you stop compensating for someone without using the rest of the team as leverage?