Whose day
The Closure That Is Not a Public Holiday
Audit weeks, plant shutdowns, stocktakes and sales conferences close an organisation as thoroughly as a national holiday and appear on no list you can look up.
Who is working when, for the people on this page
The client's procurement office, Dubai
Thursday afternoon is their Friday
The port inspector, Santos
Monday is not a working day for him
two parties · three days of the seven are working days for all of them · Tue, Wed, Thu
Two of the parties these nine notes are about. Neither week was asked about in advance, and both were discovered by something failing to arrive.
International teams need more than a time-zone converter, so managers can review the workflow here to connect calendar assumptions with the work completed around them.
For a separate reference on calendars, standards, or international operations, consult MongoDB.
Five closures that appear on no public calendar
An approval during the client's year-end audit
12 / 3Nine of the twelve days were not working days on their side: their finance team was unavailable for nine of the twelve days and nobody outside could sign. Mentioned once, in passing, nine months earlier
A drawing during the plant's August shutdown
19 / 4Fifteen of the nineteen days were not working days on their side: the factory closes for a fortnight every August and has done for thirty years. Every other customer of theirs knew
A quotation during the supplier's stocktake
8 / 4Four of the eight days were not working days on their side: two days of stocktake plus the backlog it created. Four of the eight days were ordinary working days spent on the queue
A certificate during an accreditation visit
7 / 4Three of the seven days were not working days on their side: the laboratory was being audited and no routine work was issued. Not foreseeable by anybody outside
A decision during the client's own sales conference
5 / 2Three of the five days were not working days on their side: the people who could decide were all at the same hotel. Published on their own website
five waits · 51 calendar days · 17 of them working days on the other side
Of these five, three were discoverable in advance by anybody who asked and two were not. The asking is the cheap part; the knowing which question to ask is what takes a year of working with somebody. One team's own job.
Public holidays are at least published. The closures that do more damage are the ones that appear nowhere at all.
A fortnight's plant shutdown. The week of the year-end audit. A stocktake. An accreditation visit. The three days everybody who can make a decision is at the same conference. Each of these empties an organisation as completely as a national holiday and none of them can be looked up.
Why they are worse than holidays
A holiday is at least symmetrical in its visibility: everybody on that side knows it is coming, and if asked they will say so.
An internal closure is often not thought of as a closure at all. The people inside it experience a busy week, not an absent one. Asked in advance whether they are available, they say yes, because from where they are sitting they are at work. It is only requests from outside that fall into the hole.
The four that recur
Financial closes. Year-end and, in some organisations, each quarter end. The finance function becomes unreachable, and so does anything requiring a signature from it — which in many companies includes purchase approvals, credit decisions and contract countersignature.
Production shutdowns. Common in continental European manufacturing in August and over Christmas, and in much of Asia around Lunar New Year. Usually a fixed fortnight, usually the same fortnight every year.
Stocktakes and audits. Short, one to three days, with a tail. The tail is the part that gets missed: a two-day stocktake generates a four-day queue, so the effective closure is most of a week.
Internal events. Sales conferences, all-hands weeks, training weeks. Short and invisible, and they remove exactly the senior people whose approval is being waited on.
What to ask, and when
The useful question is not "are you closed at any point" — the answer is no, because nobody thinks of these as closures. It is more specific.
Is there anything in the next quarter that would make it hard to get a decision out of you — an audit, a shutdown, a stocktake, anything internal?
Named that way, people recognise what is being asked and answer it. The list usually comes back longer than expected and includes two or three things nobody here could have guessed at.
Ask it once a quarter with anybody whose answers you depend on, and ask it as part of agreeing any window longer than a fortnight.
The tail is the part that is underestimated
Worth stating separately, because the arithmetic is consistently wrong in the same direction.
A closure of n days does not delay a request by n days. It delays it by n days plus however long it takes the queue that accumulated during those days to clear, and the queue clears at the ordinary rate of work rather than faster.
| Closure | Queue it creates | Effective delay |
|---|---|---|
| Two-day stocktake | Two days of requests | Around four days |
| One-week audit | A week of requests | Around two weeks |
| Fortnight shutdown | A fortnight, plus restart | Three to four weeks |
| Three-day conference | Three days of decisions | Around a week |
Nothing in that table is a rule. The pattern — that the recovery is about as long as the closure — is consistent enough to plan with, and planning with the closure alone is consistently optimistic.
When you find out during
The useful response is to ask for a date rather than for the thing.
"When will somebody be able to look at this" gets an answer, because the person receiving it knows the answer and can give it without committing to anything they cannot deliver. "Can you please look at this urgently" does not get an answer, because there is no honest one.
The date can then be passed on to whoever is waiting at your end, which is the only thing anybody downstream actually needs.
What to record
Every closure discovered this way goes in the same place as the counterparty's working week, with the year on it. Most of them recur. The August shutdown will be there next August; the audit will be there next year within a week of the same date; the conference moves around but happens annually.
A list of five such entries, built over a year of working with somebody, removes most of the surprise from the following year, and it is the kind of knowledge that otherwise lives in one person's head and leaves with them.
Your own, from outside
The same categories exist here and are just as invisible to counterparties.
The year-end close during which nothing commercial is approved. The week in which half the team is at a conference. The audit. The fortnight in August when the people who sign are away in rotation and nobody is technically absent.
From outside, each of these is a period of unexplained slowness, and the explanation is never given, because from inside nothing is closed.
A message sent a fortnight beforehand to anybody with live work — naming the dates and saying what will be slow — converts the whole of it into something people can plan around. It takes ten minutes and it has, of everything described here, the widest gap between what the silence costs the other side and what the warning costs you.