The live hour
What a Shared Hour Is Worth Spending On
A narrow overlap is the scarcest resource in the relationship, and most of it is spent on material that travels better in writing.
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.
When different working weeks make capacity hard to read, teams can employee workload monitoring before deciding whether a delay came from workload, handoffs, or a calendar mismatch.
Teams can compare this approach with the established guidance available from USA.gov.
Four things that were put on a weekly call, and how long each would have taken in writing
A status update covering the week
7 / 5Two of the seven days were not working days on their side: a weekly call, so a question raised on it waits a week. Fifteen minutes of everybody's only shared hour, and nobody acted on it
A set of figures everybody then re-read afterwards
7 / 5Two of the seven days were not working days on their side: the same weekly cycle. Read aloud, misheard twice, and sent in writing the next day in any case
A disagreement about the tolerance
1 / 1The one day of this wait was a working day on their side. Settled in nine minutes on the call; it had been running in writing for eleven days
An ambiguity nobody had been able to name in writing
1 / 1The one day of this wait was a working day on their side. Identified in four minutes because somebody could say that they did not understand
four waits · 16 calendar days · 12 of them working days on the other side
Two of these four were a waste of the only hour the two sides have, and two of them were the reason the hour exists. The two that worked were both things that could not have been written down in advance. One team's own job.
If there are two usable hours a week between two parties, those two hours are the scarcest thing in the relationship.
They are routinely spent reading out information that could have been sent, while the things that only work live run for a fortnight in writing.
What belongs in writing
Anything that is already settled and only needs to be known.
Status, figures, dates, specifications, decisions already taken, documents. All of these travel perfectly in writing, can be read by each party inside their own working day, can be re-read, and leave a record that does not depend on anybody's notes.
Reading them aloud is strictly worse: it is slower, it is less accurate, it excludes anybody who could not attend, and in a second language it is substantially harder to follow than the same content on a page.
What needs the hour
Four things, and they have a common property: none of them can be written down in advance, because writing them down is the part nobody can do.
Disagreement. Two parties who disagree in writing exchange positions at one round trip a day and tend to harden. The same disagreement in conversation is usually settled in ten minutes, because the shape of the objection becomes visible.
Ambiguity. Where somebody does not understand and cannot say what they do not understand. This is extremely difficult to resolve in writing and extremely quick in person, because the other party can ask a question they could not have composed.
Negotiation. Anything where the next move depends on a reaction.
Repair. When something has gone wrong and the relationship needs attention rather than the file.
The agenda that follows from this
| Before the call | On the call | After the call |
|---|---|---|
| Status, figures, documents, sent 24 hours ahead | Disagreements, ambiguities, decisions | A written record of what was agreed |
| Questions anybody wants answered | Anything somebody says they do not follow | Actions, with dates and owners |
The first column is the one that makes the middle column possible. An hour spent on a disagreement is only available if the twenty minutes of status went out the day before.
Sending the material a day ahead, not an hour
An hour ahead is no use across an offset. If the call is at ten in the morning here and that is one in the afternoon there, material sent at nine lands at noon and will not be read.
Twenty-four hours is the minimum that gives both parties a working day in which to read. For a nine-hour offset, two days is better.
Protecting it from the status habit
The pull towards status is strong, because status is comfortable, it fills the time and nobody has to disagree with anybody.
The thing that resists it is an agenda with named items, sent in advance, consisting only of questions. "Do we accept the 0.5 mm tolerance" is an agenda item. "Project update" is not, and will expand to fill the hour.
When nobody has anything that needs the hour
Cancel it, and say why.
A recurring call with nothing in it that needs to be live is costing somebody their early morning or their evening every week for no return. Cancelling one in four is a signal that the other three are real, and it protects the thing that matters most about a narrow window, which is that people take it seriously enough to turn up to it.
The counterpart obligation is to be willing to call one at short notice when something does need the hour. A standing slot that is never cancelled and never moved has usually stopped being a working arrangement and become a ritual.
The twenty minutes at the end
A specific and avoidable waste, worth separating from the general argument.
Most calls that are scheduled for an hour use the hour. The last twenty minutes are usually the weakest: the substantive items have been covered, people are tired, and the remaining time fills with the things that would have gone in writing.
Scheduling forty minutes instead of sixty removes that without removing anything of value, and it gives both sides twenty minutes back at an hour that is scarce for at least one of them.
Where the agenda genuinely needs an hour, the thing to protect is the order: the item that most needs the live hour goes first, not last. A call that runs over has then lost the material that could have been written down, which is the right thing to lose.