Waiting
What One Round Trip Costs
Across a large offset the unit of delay is the round trip rather than the hour, which makes the number of exchanges the only variable worth optimising.
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.
Where an agreed deadline crosses several working weeks, learn more here can add the operational visibility needed to separate waiting time from active work.
For a separate reference on calendars, standards, or international operations, consult PwC.
Four exchanges, measured by how many round trips each took
A specification query resolved in one exchange
2 / 2Both days of this wait were working days on their side. Asked completely, answered completely
The same kind of query, resolved in three exchanges
6 / 6All six days of this wait were working days on their side. Each answer raised one further question that could have been asked at the start
A drawing revision resolved in five exchanges
11 / 7Four of the eleven days were not working days on their side: a weekend and their Monday holiday. Four of the five questions were foreseeable from the first drawing
A commercial point resolved in two exchanges across a Sunday-to-Thursday week
7 / 3Four of the seven days were not working days on their side: the second question was sent on our Friday. One round trip that cost four calendar days on its own
four waits · 26 calendar days · 18 of them working days on the other side
Four exchanges, eleven round trips between them. With a nine-hour offset a round trip is a day whatever it contains, so the number of questions asked matters more than the difficulty of any of them. One team's own job.
Across a large offset, one exchange costs one day. It costs one day whether the question is hard or trivial, whether the answer is three words or three pages.
This makes the arithmetic unusual. The cost of a conversation is governed almost entirely by how many times it goes back and forth, and hardly at all by the content.
Why a round trip is a day
You send at four in the afternoon. They read it the following morning their time, which is your night. They answer during their day, which is also your night. You read it the next morning.
Elapsed: about twenty hours, of which perhaps fifteen minutes was work. Add a weekend that is not shared and the same exchange costs three or four days.
The consequence for how questions are written
The usual advice about brevity runs the wrong way here.
A short message that asks one question, gets one answer, and raises a second question has cost two days. A longer message that asks everything that could plausibly be needed, including the questions that depend on the answers to the first ones, costs one.
The longer message is harder to write. It requires thinking through the branches: if the answer is A then I will need to know X, and if it is B then I will need Y. That thinking takes twenty minutes and saves a day, which is a trade almost nobody would refuse if it were presented as one.
The conditional form
The construction that does this work is a question with its own branches attached.
Is the 40 mm spacing confirmed? If yes, can you also confirm the bolt grade. If it has changed, please send the revised detail and tell me whether the overall length moves with it.
Three questions, one round trip, and the recipient answers whichever branch applies without having to come back. This reads slightly laborious and it is: the alternative reads smoother and takes three days.
Counting the trips on a live item
Worth doing once, for something currently in flight, because the number is usually higher than anybody has noticed.
Open the thread and count the messages. Five exchanges on a nine-hour offset with one weekend in the middle is around nine or ten days of elapsed time, of which the total work is perhaps an hour.
That ratio is the argument for everything else in this section. It is not that people are slow; it is that the structure of the conversation is spending days on an hour of work.
What else collapses round trips
- Send the document, not a description of it. A question about a drawing with the drawing attached is one trip; without it, two.
- Answer the question you were asked and the one behind it. If somebody asks when the goods ship, tell them the ship date and the arrival date.
- Offer options rather than asking what they want. "I propose Tuesday at 09:00 UTC; Wednesday at the same time also works" is one trip. "When suits you?" is two or three.
- State what you will do if you hear nothing. "Unless you tell me otherwise by Thursday I will book the Tuesday slot" converts a required reply into an optional one.
The last of these is the strongest and the most underused. A great many round trips exist only to collect a confirmation that nobody would have withheld.
Where this stops applying
Inside a shared working day none of it matters much, and over-applying it makes correspondence stiff and slightly exhausting to read.
The place to spend the effort is any thread crossing more than about six hours, and particularly any thread crossing a weekend that the two parties do not share. There, the difference between a well-formed question and a casual one is measured in days.
Writing the answer the same way
The same discipline applies to replying, and it is less often observed because answering feels like the end of the exchange rather than the middle of it.
An answer that resolves the question asked and leaves the obvious next question unanswered has cost a round trip. If somebody asks whether the material has been released and the answer is yes, the useful reply also says when it goes to the galvaniser, because that is what they were going to ask next.
The test is to read your own answer and ask what you would write back if you received it. Whatever that is, it belongs in the message.
This takes thirty seconds and is the cheapest day anybody can buy in this subject. It also makes the exchange feel entirely different from the other end, in a way that is remembered well beyond the particular question.