The live hour
The Call That Should Have Been Three Lines
A recurring call across a large offset is paid for weekly by whoever is at the wrong end of it, and the payment is never counted against what the call produces.
Who is working when, for the people on this page
Our engineering office, Auckland
Working 08:00 to 17:00
The client's technical department, Lisbon
Working 08:00 to 17:00 their time, which is 19:00 to 04:00 here
two parties · five days of the seven are working days for all of them · Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri
Five working days a week in common and not one working hour. Everything on that contract was going to be written down whether anybody planned for it or not.
Where an agreed deadline crosses several working weeks, cross-border team time tracking can add the operational visibility needed to separate waiting time from active work.
The surrounding operational question can also be checked against material from World Bank.
Four meetings, and what each one cost the people who attended
A weekly status call at 07:00 here and 14:00 there
35 / 2510 of the 35 days were not working days on their side: held every week for seven months. Thirty-five early mornings for four people on this side
A decision meeting arranged at two days' notice
2 / 2Both days of this wait were working days on their side. The decision was taken; it could not have been taken in writing
A call to repair a relationship after a dispute
1 / 1The one day of this wait was a working day on their side. Worth every minute, and nobody on either side would have written what was said
three waits · 38 calendar days · 28 of them working days on the other side
Of the four, one was a standing cost of thirty-five early starts and two were worth the hour they took. The second line is not drawn at all, because a note that is read inside somebody's working day costs nobody anything. One team's own job.
A weekly call at seven in the morning, held for seven months, is thirty-five early starts for everybody on that side.
Nobody counts them. The call appears on the schedule as one hour a week, and the hour before it — the one in which somebody got up, made coffee and sat down in the dark — is not on any schedule at all.
The arithmetic nobody does
An hour-long call has a visible cost of one hour times the number of attendees. That is the number anybody would quote if asked.
Across an offset there are two further costs.
The first is the displacement. A seven o'clock call is not an hour of somebody's working day; it is an hour before it, and it generally takes the preceding hour with it. The working day that follows is a full one.
The second is the compounding. A standing arrangement is agreed once and paid weekly, and the agreement is almost always made by somebody who is not at the wrong end of it.
The test
For any recurring call across an offset, ask two questions.
Could the content have been written? If yes, write it. The reading happens inside everybody's own working day and costs nobody an early morning.
Does it need everybody? Usually not. A call with nine people on it, three of whom are there in case something comes up, is three people paying the displacement cost for an option.
What a written version looks like
Short, structured, and sent on a fixed day so that people know to look for it.
Week 11. Cutting finished Tuesday; galvanising booked for the 19th. One open point: the 0.5 mm tolerance on the flange — we need a decision by Friday, see the attached note.
Nothing else needs anybody's attention this week.
That is the whole of a typical status call. It takes four minutes to write, is read in two, and leaves a record that anybody who joins the project in March can read.
The last line is worth including deliberately. A note that says nothing needs attention is doing useful work: it is the difference between silence that means all is well and silence that means nobody has looked.
When the call should exist
Three cases, from the panel above and in general.
A decision that cannot be reached in writing, arranged when it is needed rather than standing. A disagreement that has run for more than a few exchanges. And repair, after something has gone wrong, where the purpose is the relationship rather than the content.
All three are occasional. None of them justifies a standing slot.
Replacing a standing call
The move that works is to replace it with a written note and an on-demand slot.
I am going to stop the Tuesday call and send a written summary each Monday instead. If anything on it needs a conversation, say so and I will find half an hour that week — I would rather we spend the live time on things that need it.
That is received well, including by people who proposed the call originally, because the early start is unpopular on both sides and usually nobody has wanted to be the one to say so.
The one thing to keep
Whatever replaces a standing call has to keep its one real function, which is that it creates a guaranteed moment at which somebody will raise a problem.
A written note does not do that by itself. What does is an explicit invitation attached to it — a line asking whether anything needs a conversation this week — and a willingness to find the half hour when the answer is yes.
The thirty-five mornings, counted
Worth putting a number on, because the cost is otherwise distributed too thinly to notice.
Thirty-five calls at an hour each, for four people, is one hundred and forty hours. Adding the displaced hour before each one — the one spent getting up, not the one spent on the call — roughly doubles it.
Against that, the question is what the calls produced that a written note would not have. On most standing arrangements the honest answer is one or two decisions over the whole period, and both of those could have been separate conversations arranged when they were needed.
The arithmetic is not an argument against meeting. It is an argument for meeting when there is something to meet about, which is a different and much smaller number of occasions than a standing weekly slot implies.