The agreement
What This Is Actually About
The whole of this collection reduces to one asymmetry: you can change your own week and nobody else's, and everything useful follows from that.
Who is working when, for the people on this page
The supplier who quoted eleven per cent less
Two hours of overlap a day
The supplier who quoted eleven per cent more
Seven hours of overlap a day, and the same weekend as ours
two parties · five days of the seven are working days for all of them · Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri
The two quotations were compared on price, lead time and references. The right-hand column was in neither comparison and was worth more than the eleven per cent.
Where an agreed deadline crosses several working weeks, explore the tool can add the operational visibility needed to separate waiting time from active work.
Teams can compare this approach with the established guidance available from Node.js.
The five parties this collection has been describing, one last time
Your team
The only week on this list that anybody here can change
The client
Cannot be asked, because they are paying
The fabrication shop
Will not be asked, because you are one of forty customers
The forwarder
Asked once, politely, and declined
The port inspector
Not a commercial relationship at all
five parties · three days of the seven are working days for all of them · Tue, Wed, Thu
Four of these five weeks are facts rather than arrangements. Almost all of the useful work in this subject consists of finding out what they are, early, and building the schedule on them instead of on the one week you control. One team's own job.
Fifty notes, and they reduce to one asymmetry.
You can change your own week. You cannot change anybody else's. Every piece of advice written about distributed working assumes the first and most of this subject consists of the second.
What follows from that
Four things, and they are the whole of it.
Find out, rather than assume. Which days they work, what closes them, who decides and when that person is available. Two questions, asked once, at the start. This is the cheapest thing in the collection and the most reliably skipped.
Write it down where a stranger will find it. The information expires slowly and leaves the building quickly. A colleague agreeing a date in November should not be rediscovering what somebody learned in March.
Say instants, not days. A date with a zone and an hour on it cannot be read two ways. Almost every dispute in this subject begins as a sentence that felt complete to the person who wrote it.
Build the gap into the agreement rather than into somebody's evening. The difference between two weeks is a real cost. It can be priced, scheduled around, bought back in part, or absorbed by a person getting up at six. Only the last of those is free, and it is not free.
The thing that is easy to miss
Most of this collection is about what other people's calendars do to you. About a fifth of it is about what yours does to them, and that fifth is where the cheapest improvements are.
Your weekend is somebody's two-day delay. Your end-of-day is somebody's missed slot. The four-minute reply you left until the morning cost a supplier a week, and you will never hear about it, which is exactly why it keeps happening.
Five minutes before leaving, spent on anything somebody will be sitting in front of tomorrow morning their time, is worth more than every other habit here put together.
What this collection does not claim
That any of it makes anything faster. A fourteen-day customs clearance is fourteen days; a two-week shutdown is two weeks; a nine-hour offset is nine hours.
What changes is whether those facts are known in advance by the person making a promise. Almost all of the damage in this subject is done not by delay but by commitments made in ignorance of it — to a customer, to a colleague, to somebody further down a chain nobody has looked at.
The five parties, last time
The panel above is the same five that have appeared throughout. Four of the five weeks on it are facts. One is an arrangement.
A schedule built on the arrangement is a schedule built on the only part of the system that was never the constraint. A schedule built on the four facts is simply a schedule, and it has the useful property of being roughly true.
Where to start, if nothing here is being done
Three things, in order, and none of them needs anybody's permission.
- Ask your two most important counterparties which days they work and what closes them in the next quarter. Write the answers where the next person will look.
- Put a zone and an hour on every date you state for a month.
- Spend five minutes at the end of each day on whatever somebody else is waiting for.
That is a fortnight of effort measured in minutes, it requires no process, no tool and no agreement with anybody, and it removes most of what the remaining forty-seven notes are about.
The six parts, in a sentence each
For anybody who reached here first.
Whose day it is. Find out which days they work and what closes them, and write it down where the next person will look.
What a deadline means. A day of the week is not an instant. Put a date, an hour and a zone on anything that matters.
Waiting on them. Work out whether they have had a working hour before chasing, ask fewer and better questions, and find out whether you are in a queue, a batch, a cycle or a duration.
Being waited on. Your delays are invisible to you and expensive to them. Answer the short things, and say when, if you cannot say what.
The live hour. Count it, protect it, spend it only on what cannot be written, and notice whose evening it is.
When the gap is the deal. Price it, ask about it before signing, and put it in the agreement rather than in somebody's early morning.