Being waited on
Somebody Is Waiting On You and You Do Not Know It
The waiting you cause is invisible from where you sit, which is why it is both larger than you think and cheaper to fix than the waiting you suffer.
Who is working when, for the people on this page
Us, as our signature block describes us
Five working days, 08:00 to 17:00
Us, as a client three hours ahead experiences us
By their Friday afternoon nobody here answers at all
two parties · four days of the seven are working days for all of them · Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu
The same organisation, described twice. Only the first of these two rows has ever been written down anywhere.
Where an agreed deadline crosses several working weeks, distributed team productivity insights can add the operational visibility needed to separate waiting time from active work.
Teams can compare this approach with the established guidance available from 24TimeZones.
Four things that sat on this side, measured on the calendar of whoever was waiting
A confirmation the client needed before their own Thursday deadline
3 / 2One of the three days was not a working day on their side: our weekend, which is not theirs. Took four minutes when it was finally done
A drawing the shop needed to start cutting
5 / 4One of the five days was not a working day on their side: two days of ours, two of theirs, and nobody flagged it. The shop lost its Saturday slot and the next one was a week later
An answer to a question from a contractor eight hours ahead
2 / 2Both days of this wait were working days on their side. Written promptly by our standards and a full day late by theirs
A signature the forwarder needed for a Friday sailing
6 / 4Two of the six days were not working days on their side: a public holiday here that the forwarder had no reason to know about. The sailing went without it
four waits · 16 calendar days · 12 of them working days on the other side
Four items that nobody here recorded as outstanding. All four were on somebody else's critical path, and in none of the four did anyone on this side know that. One team's own job.
Everything in the previous section applies to you, seen from the other side.
Your weekend is somebody's two-day delay. Your end-of-day is somebody's missed cut-off. Your holiday is a silence nobody can explain. And none of it appears anywhere on your own screen.
Why it is invisible
An item you are waiting on sits in your mailbox, in your list, in your head. It is visible continuously and generates a small amount of anxiety every time you see it.
An item somebody is waiting on from you sits in their list. On your side it is a message that was read once and is now four screens down. There is no mechanism that brings it back, and no feeling attached to it at all.
That asymmetry is the whole of this section. The waiting you cause does not hurt, so it does not get managed.
What it costs on the other side
Usually more than the same delay would cost you, for a structural reason: you are frequently the party they cannot replace.
A supplier waiting on a customer's approval cannot proceed, cannot reallocate the slot easily, and cannot escalate without damaging a commercial relationship. The three days are three days of a booked machine, a held slot, or a person standing waiting.
In the panel above, four minutes of work cost a supplier a week, because the Saturday slot it missed was the only one that week.
The three habits that remove most of it
Answer the short things immediately. Anything that takes under two minutes should be done on the first reading, regardless of priority. The two minutes cost you nothing; the deferral costs somebody else a day or more. This single habit removes most of the delay you cause.
Say when, if you cannot say what. A one-line acknowledgement with a date converts an unbounded silence into a plannable wait. It is the cheapest message in the subject and the one most reliably not sent.
Check your own outstanding before you leave. Not your inbox — specifically, anything where somebody is waiting on you and their working day starts while yours is finishing.
The end-of-day check
Worth describing precisely, because it is five minutes and it is the highest-value five minutes available.
Before you leave, look at anything from a counterparty whose working day is about to begin or is still running. For each, either answer it, or send one line saying when it will be answered.
| Their offset | What your evening is for them | Whether the check matters |
|---|---|---|
| Seven hours behind | Their late morning | Very much: they have a day left |
| Three hours ahead | Their evening | Only for tomorrow's start |
| Eight hours ahead | Their night | For their morning, which is your night |
| Same zone, different week | Possibly their weekend | Depends on the day |
The first row is the one people miss. At six in the evening here there is a counterparty with four working hours in front of them, and anything sent now is actioned today rather than tomorrow.
Making your own waiting visible
The mechanism that works is a list of what other people are waiting on from you, kept in the same place as the list of what you are waiting on from others.
It does not need to be elaborate. Three columns — what, who, since when — and a glance at it at the end of each day. The point is not organisation; it is that the items acquire the same visibility as the ones that are irritating you, and therefore the same chance of being dealt with.
The reciprocity argument
There is a self-interested version of all this and it is worth stating.
A counterparty who is never kept waiting by you answers you faster. Not as a conscious exchange, but because the relationship carries less friction, your messages arrive at the top of a queue that is sorted partly by how easy you are to deal with, and the goodwill is available when you need something genuinely out of the ordinary.
That is a real return on about five minutes a day.
What to do on the day before a closure
The one occasion when this matters more than usual, and the one most often missed, because it is the day everybody is trying to get away.
Before a holiday here, or a shutdown, or a long weekend, anything outstanding to a counterparty should be either answered or dated. A question left on a Thursday evening before a four-day closure here is not left for a day; it is left for five, and the other side has no way of knowing why.
Fifteen minutes, spent on the last afternoon, on exactly the items somebody else is waiting for. The alternative is five days of silence that will be read as indifference by people who were never told the office was shut.
Sending the closure dates at the same time costs another two minutes and prevents the chase that would otherwise arrive on day two of it.