Being waited on
Telling People When You Will Answer
A wait with a date attached is a different experience from the same wait without one, and the difference is larger than any available speed gain.
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.
A useful pilot starts with a baseline rather than a guess; teams can track work across time zones and compare capacity before and after changing a handoff or overlap window.
For a separate reference on calendars, standards, or international operations, consult Greenwich Mean Time.
Four long waits, two of them with a date attached and two without
A technical review that took eleven days, with a date given on day one
11 / 7Four of the eleven days were not working days on their side: the work genuinely takes that long. Nobody chased; the client planned around it and said so afterwards
A technical review that took nine days, with nothing said
9 / 6Three of the nine days were not working days on their side: the same work, two days faster. Chased four times, escalated once, and remembered as the slow one
A quotation that took six days, with a date given
6 / 4Two of the six days were not working days on their side: a weekend and a colleague's absence. One acknowledgement, no chases
A quotation that took five days, with nothing said
5 / 3Two of the five days were not working days on their side: a weekend. Three chases, and a question about whether we wanted the business
four waits · 31 calendar days · 20 of them working days on the other side
The two waits with a date attached were longer and were experienced as shorter. Nothing about the work differed; only whether the other side could plan. One team's own job.
A nine-day silence is worse than an eleven-day wait with a date on it.
That is not a statement about perception management. It is a statement about what the other party can do: with a date they can plan, commit downstream and stop thinking about it, and without one they can do none of those things and must keep checking.
What the date is for
The person waiting almost never needs the thing immediately. They need to know when they will have it, because they have their own commitment to make.
A supplier told "Thursday" can book the slot for Friday. A supplier told nothing cannot book anything, has to hold capacity against a date they are guessing at, and will chase in order to reduce their own exposure.
The chasing is not impatience. It is the only instrument they have.
The form
One line, sent on the day the request arrives.
Got this. It needs our engineering team, who will look at it on Monday, so you will have an answer by Tuesday afternoon your time.
Three components: it arrived, roughly why it takes time, and a date. The middle one matters more than it looks: a wait with a visible reason is accepted, and the same wait with no reason reads as deprioritisation.
Giving a date you can keep
The common objection is that you do not know how long it will take, and giving a date you then miss is worse than giving none.
That is true, and the answer is to give a date for the next thing you can control rather than for the outcome.
| What you cannot promise | What you can |
|---|---|
| When the answer will be ready | When you will have an estimate of when it will be ready |
| That engineering will approve | When engineering will have looked at it |
| The delivery date | When the shop will confirm the delivery date |
| That the committee will say yes | When the committee meets |
Every entry in the right column is a date you control or can find out in one call, and every one of them is enough for the other party to plan against.
Updating it
If the date is going to be missed, say so before it passes, not after.
This is the point at which most of the credit earned by giving a date in the first place is either kept or spent. A revised date sent on the day before is an inconvenience, and the same information volunteered a day late, after the original passed in silence, is worse than never having given a date at all — because it demonstrates that your dates are not tracked by you either.
The hardest case
The hardest message of this kind is the one where the answer is going to be no and is going to take a while.
The instinct is to delay, because the message is unwelcome and there is a vague hope that the situation will change. It almost never does, and the delay means the other party spends two weeks planning around something that was never going to happen.
I will be straight with you: I think this is unlikely to be approved, and I will know for certain by the 20th. You may want to look at the alternative in the meantime.
That is a difficult message to send and it is the most valuable one in this section. People remember receiving it, and they remember who sent it.
What it buys
The two things worth naming.
Chasing stops, which saves your own time by more than the line costs. And the next time you need something unreasonable from that counterparty — a date pulled forward, a favour, a slot outside the normal run — the request is heard by somebody who has been dealt with straight for six months.
Dates for things you are not doing
The same principle covers the case where the answer is that you are not going to act at all.
A request that has been declined, deprioritised or absorbed into something else is frequently left unanswered, on the reasoning that there is nothing to report. From the other end that is identical to being forgotten, and the chasing continues for weeks.
We are not going to take this forward this quarter. Nothing has gone wrong; it has been overtaken by the Riyadh order. If that changes I will tell you.
Three sentences. They are harder to send than a positive update and they are received better than silence by a wide margin, because the person on the other end can stop holding capacity, stop chasing and make their own decisions.
The message people regret sending in this category is almost never this one; it is the one they sent six weeks later.