Being waited on
What Your Own Week Looks Like From Outside
Your organisation's stated availability and the availability your counterparties experience are different numbers, and the second one is never measured.
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 cross-border schedule is easier to manage when availability is grounded in evidence; global workforce productivity tools provides a practical reference for time, activity, and project reporting.
For broader context beyond this collection, see the resources published by United Nations.
Our own week, as we describe it and as our counterparties experience it
Us, as stated on the website and in the signature block
Five working days, 08:00 to 17:00
Us, as experienced by a client three hours ahead
By their Friday afternoon nobody here answers, and our Monday morning is their lunchtime
Us, as experienced by a shop seven hours ahead
Our morning is their evening, so the usable overlap is about two hours a day
Us, during the three weeks around the summer holidays
Two of the five days had nobody who could approve anything
four parties · three days of the seven are working days for all of them · Mon, Tue, Wed
We describe ourselves as available five days a week. Not one of our counterparties experiences that. The fourth row is the one nobody here would have written down, and it is the one that caused the most trouble. One team's own job.
Your organisation says it works Monday to Friday, nine to five. Nobody outside it experiences that.
A counterparty three hours ahead experiences four days. One seven hours ahead experiences a two-hour window. Everybody experiences August as something quite different from what the website says.
The four reductions
The offset. Every hour of offset removes an hour from the usable overlap at one end or the other. Beyond about six hours the overlap is breakfast or dinner for somebody.
The week. If their week ends on Thursday, your Friday does not exist to them, and if yours ends on Friday, their Sunday does not exist to you. Five days becomes four.
The internal structure. The person who can answer is in meetings on Tuesdays, works four days, or is the only one who can sign. The organisation is available; the decision is not.
The seasons. Summer, Christmas, the audit, the conference. Three or four weeks a year at substantially reduced capacity, none of which is announced to anybody outside.
Measuring it honestly
The exercise is short and uncomfortable. For your two or three most important counterparties, write down the hours in a normal week during which somebody here who can decide is at a desk at the same time they are.
The number is usually between six and fifteen. The number people assume is forty.
| Counterparty | Stated availability | Overlapping hours with a decision-maker |
|---|---|---|
| Three hours ahead | Forty hours | About twelve |
| Seven hours ahead | Forty hours | About eight |
| Seven hours behind | Forty hours | About ten |
| Any, in August | Forty hours | Three or four |
Publishing it
Most of the damage here is not the reduction. It is that nobody outside knows about it, so their plans are built on forty.
The remedy is to say so, in the places where counterparties already look.
- A signature block that says the office hours and the time zone, not just the city.
- An acknowledgement that names the realistic window: "we are generally able to answer between 08:00 and 11:00 your time".
- Advance notice of closures, sent before them rather than discovered during.
- A named alternative for the periods when the usual person is unavailable.
None of these makes you more available. All of them let the other side plan against the real number, which is worth more to them than an extra hour would be.
The seasonal one is the most expensive
The fourth row of the panel is three weeks a year in which approvals effectively stopped. Nobody here would have described the organisation as closed; everybody was at work, and several people were away in rotation such that the particular combination needed to approve anything was rarely present.
From outside it looked like a month of unexplained slowness, and it was the single largest source of complaint in the year.
It is also the easiest to fix, because it is foreseeable in May. One message in May, naming the weeks and what will be slow, converts a mystery into an arrangement.
The useful self-check
Once a quarter, ask one counterparty a direct question.
How easy are we to get hold of, from where you are? Is there anything about our hours that makes your life difficult?
They will answer, usually at some length, and the answer will contain at least one thing nobody here had considered. It is the only way this information ever arrives, because nobody volunteers a complaint about a customer's working hours.
The signature block
The cheapest of all the fixes in this note, and the one almost nobody does.
A signature block that says the city is of no use to somebody who does not know where the city is or what it is doing at four in the afternoon. One that says the hours and the offset lets anybody compute the answer in two seconds.
Hamburg · office hours 08:00–17:00 CET (UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer)
Fourteen characters of real information. It appears on every message anybody here sends, it is read by every counterparty at some point, and it removes a question that would otherwise be asked by nobody and guessed at by everybody.
The summer clause matters more than it looks: a correspondent in a country that does not change its clocks has no reason to know that yours does.