Waiting
Knowing Whether You Are In a Queue
Four things look identical from outside — a queue, a batch, a cycle and a duration — and only one of them is affected by asking again.
Who is working when, for the people on this page
Us, Hamburg, sending the chases
Chases get written on our Monday and our Friday
The supplier receiving them, Taipei
Our Friday afternoon is their Saturday, which is a working day
two parties · five days of the seven are working days for all of them · Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri
The two days on which chases are habitually written here are the two worst days to send them to either of the counterparties in these notes.
When different working weeks make capacity hard to read, teams can the complete guide before deciding whether a delay came from workload, handoffs, or a calendar mismatch.
The surrounding operational question can also be checked against material from Gartner.
Five waits, sorted by what was actually happening during them
A drawing sitting with one reviewer
7 / 5Two of the seven days were not working days on their side: the reviewer had eleven other drawings and a fixed Tuesday slot. A queue, and a weekly one
A test result from an accredited laboratory
12 / 8Four of the twelve days were not working days on their side: the test itself runs for six days and cannot be hurried. Not a queue at all: the thing takes that long
A quotation from a busy fabricator
9 / 5Four of the nine days were not working days on their side: two days of their weekend, and a sales team that batches quotations on Thursdays. A batch, which is a queue with a timetable
A credit decision from the client's finance team
6 / 2Four of the six days were not working days on their side: year-end, and the committee meets fortnightly. A cycle, and we had missed it by a day
A customs release
4 / 3One of the four days was not a working day on their side: one weekend. Nothing was waiting on anybody; this is simply the duration
five waits · 38 calendar days · 23 of them working days on the other side
Only one of these five was a queue in the ordinary sense. The other four were a process duration, a batch, a cycle and a weekend, and each of those responds to a different action. Chasing helps with exactly one of them. One team's own job.
From outside, every delay looks the same: you asked for something and it has not arrived.
From inside, there are at least four different situations, and the action that helps in one is useless or harmful in the others.
The four
A queue. Your item is behind other items in front of one person or team. It will be reached in order. Chasing may move you up the queue, at somebody else's expense, and this is the only one of the four where chasing does anything.
A batch. Work is collected and processed together on a schedule — quotations on Thursdays, payments on the 1st and the 15th, releases on alternate Fridays. Arriving a minute after a batch closes costs a full cycle, and chasing in the middle achieves nothing because the mechanism is not a person deciding.
A cycle. A committee, a board, a weekly review. Same shape as a batch, but with people, and with the additional property that the material has to be complete before the cut-off rather than merely submitted.
A duration. The thing simply takes that long. A test runs for six days. Concrete cures. A shipment sails. Nothing is waiting on anybody and no amount of attention shortens it.
How to tell which one you are in
Ask, in terms that make the answer easy to give.
Is this waiting on somebody, or is it just how long it takes? And if it is waiting, is there a date it gets looked at?
People answer this accurately and without defensiveness, because none of the four answers reflects badly on them. The question also signals that you are trying to plan rather than to apply pressure, which makes the answer more honest.
What to do in each case
| Situation | Useful action | Useless action |
|---|---|---|
| Queue | Ask where you are in it; ask what would move you up | Repeating the request |
| Batch | Find the cut-off and hit the next one | Chasing between cut-offs |
| Cycle | Get complete material in before the next meeting | Chasing after the meeting |
| Duration | Plan around it and stop asking | Anything at all |
The right-hand column is where most effort goes, because from outside all four feel like a queue and chasing feels like doing something.
The cut-off is the most valuable single fact
For batches and cycles, one question is worth more than any amount of follow-up: what is the latest I can get this to you for the next run.
That converts an indefinite wait into a deadline on your own side, which is a thing you can control. It also frequently reveals that the real constraint is not where anybody thought: the committee meets on Thursday, but papers must be circulated by Monday, so the actual deadline is four days earlier than the visible one.
Queues have a shape worth asking about
Where it really is a queue, two follow-up questions pay for themselves.
How long is it, roughly — which tells you whether this is two days or two weeks, and lets you make an honest promise downstream.
And what moves things up it. The answer is sometimes nothing, which is useful to know. Often it is something specific and cheap: a complete submission rather than one missing a document, a request from a named person rather than a general mailbox, or a flag that this one is blocking a shipment.
Telling your own side which one it is
The reason to establish all this is not curiosity. It is that the person waiting at your end is going to ask when it will arrive, and the four situations produce four very different answers.
"It is in a queue of about a week" is a plannable statement. "It takes twelve days and nothing can change that" is also plannable. "I have chased them again" is not an answer to the question and is the one most often given.
Telling the difference from outside
Where the question cannot be asked, three signals separate the four situations reasonably well.
A batch shows up as replies arriving on the same weekday. Three consecutive answers on a Thursday afternoon is a Thursday batch, and the useful conclusion is to submit on Wednesday.
A cycle shows up as a fixed interval: answers arriving seven or fourteen days after submission regardless of complexity. That is a meeting, and the thing to find out is when it sits.
A queue shows up as variable delays correlated with nothing, and as occasional very fast answers when somebody happens to be free.
A duration shows up as the same interval every time, including for trivial requests, which is the signature nothing else produces.
None of this is reliable enough to act on alone, and all of it is worth having as a starting point for the question that confirms it.