Being waited on
The Reply You Could Have Sent Before Leaving
The gap between reading something and replying is where most of the delay you cause lives, and nearly all of it is items that took under two minutes.
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.
When different working weeks make capacity hard to read, teams can online timesheets for remote teams before deciding whether a delay came from workload, handoffs, or a calendar mismatch.
A useful independent source for this part of the workflow is Nations Online.
Four replies, and how long each sat after it had been read
A confirmation that took thirty-five seconds to write
1 / 1The one day of this wait was a working day on their side. Read at 17:35 and written at 09:10 the following morning
A yes or no on a drawing revision
1 / 1The one day of this wait was a working day on their side. Deferred because it looked as though it needed thought, and it did not
A document forwarded to the colleague who owned it
1 / 1The one day of this wait was a working day on their side. A single action, postponed because the day had ended
An acknowledgement of a request that would take a week
3 / 1Two of the three days were not working days on their side: our weekend, which the sender does not share. The acknowledgement was the whole of what was needed before Monday
four waits · 6 calendar days · 4 of them working days on the other side
Not one of these four took two minutes to write, and every one of them was written on the morning after the evening it was read. Across a nine-hour offset each of those mornings was a day on the other side. One team’s own job.
Look at the four most recent things you replied to a day after reading them, and ask how long each reply actually took to write.
The answer is usually under two minutes, and in a cross-border context those two minutes were worth a day.
Why short things get deferred
Not because they are hard. Because the moment of reading is usually the middle of something else, and the sensible-feeling response is to return to it when there is a clear run.
The clear run arrives the following morning. The item is then dealt with in ninety seconds, which was always how long it was going to take.
There is also a quality instinct involved: a reply written in thirty seconds feels careless, and a reply worth sending feels like it deserves attention. For a confirmation or a forward, that instinct is simply wrong, and it is expensive.
The two-minute rule, with the time zone added
The familiar version — if it takes under two minutes, do it now — is usually justified on the grounds that deferring costs more than doing.
Across an offset it is stronger than that. Deferring by one evening does not cost a small amount of handling overhead; it costs the other party a working day, and if your weekend or theirs is in the way, three.
So the threshold should be higher here than it would be domestically. Five minutes is a reasonable line for anything going to a counterparty whose working day is about to start while yours ends.
The four kinds that qualify
- A confirmation. Yes, that works. Received, thank you. Agreed.
- A forward. Passing something to the person who actually owns it, with one line of context.
- A short factual answer. A number, a date, a name, a file.
- An acknowledgement of something large. "This will take me until Thursday" — which is not the answer, and is the whole of what the other side needs today.
The fourth is the one most often skipped, on the reasoning that there is no point replying until there is something to say. From the other end, a large request sent into silence is indistinguishable from one that was never received.
The habit that makes it work
Decide at the moment of reading, not at the moment of planning.
When something is opened, it gets one of three dispositions: answered now, because it is short; given a date now, in one line, because it is not; or explicitly left, because nobody is waiting.
The third category is larger than people expect and it is legitimate. The error is not leaving things; it is leaving things that somebody is standing waiting for, without saying so.
What this looks like at the end of a day
Five minutes, and a specific question: is there anything here that somebody will be sitting in front of tomorrow morning their time, unable to proceed.
Those get answered or dated before you leave. Everything else can wait, and most of it will turn out not to need doing at all.
The thing not to do
Do not answer everything immediately as a policy. It produces worse answers to the things that deserve thought, it trains counterparties to expect a response time you cannot sustain, and it converts a working day into a sequence of interruptions.
The distinction being drawn here is narrow and it is worth keeping narrow: short items with somebody waiting on them, sent before the end of your day. Everything else can run on whatever rhythm suits the work.
The cost of the alternative
The objection to all of this is interruption, and it is a real one.
Answering everything the moment it arrives destroys the working day, produces worse answers to the things that needed thought, and trains counterparties to expect a response time nobody can sustain through a busy week.
So the rule being described here is narrow on purpose. It is not "answer everything immediately". It is: twice a day, look at what is short and what somebody is waiting on, and clear that. Once in the morning, once before leaving.
Ten minutes in total, two fixed points, and no interruption to the rest of the day. That handles nearly all of the delay caused on this side while leaving the working day intact, which is more than can be said for either of the two obvious alternatives.