Whose day
The Friday and Saturday Weekend
A week running Sunday to Thursday is not a shortened week. It overlaps yours by four days, and the two it misses are the two you most often use.
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.
Where an agreed deadline crosses several working weeks, open the feature page can add the operational visibility needed to separate waiting time from active work.
The surrounding operational question can also be checked against material from Redis.
Four weeks that all call themselves five-day weeks
Your team, Hamburg
Weekend on Saturday and Sunday
The client's office, Dubai
Weekend on Friday and Saturday
A subcontractor in Tel Aviv
Weekend on Friday and Saturday
A consultant in Karachi
Sunday only, and Saturday is a short day
four parties · four days of the seven are working days for all of them · Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu
Nobody on this page has an unusual week. All four are ordinary and local, and between them they leave four days where everybody is at a desk, and the Karachi row is the only reason it is not three. One team's own job.
A working week that runs Sunday to Thursday is a full five-day week. It is not a variation on yours, and treating it as one produces most of the avoidable damage in this part of the subject.
The overlap with a Monday-to-Friday week is four days. The two non-overlapping days are Friday, which is their weekend, and Sunday, which is yours.
Why the four days are not four days
On paper, losing one day of overlap out of five sounds survivable. In practice the loss is concentrated in exactly the wrong place.
Friday afternoon is when a great deal of work gets sent. It is the natural end of a week here: the drawing is finished, the question is asked, the approval is requested, and the sender goes home with the item off their desk.
On the other side that item lands on the second day of a weekend. It is read on Sunday, which is their Monday, by which point the sender has not thought about it for two days and will not think about it again until their own Monday.
A Friday-afternoon send costs three days before anybody has done anything wrong.
The mirror of the same problem
The reverse costs less but is more irritating, because it looks like rudeness from both sides.
Work sent on a Sunday from Dubai arrives in Hamburg on a weekend. It sits unread until Monday, by which time the sender has had a full working day of silence and may reasonably conclude they are being ignored. On the second occasion they chase, and the chase also arrives on a weekend.
Neither side is doing anything unreasonable. Both are working their own ordinary week.
What to do about Friday
The useful habit is small: anything going to a Sunday-to-Thursday counterparty should leave on Thursday, not Friday.
That is not an instruction to work harder on Thursday. It is a reordering of the queue. Of the things waiting to go out at the end of a week, the ones with a Friday–Saturday weekend at the far end go first, because they are the ones where a day's delay here costs three days there.
Most people, told this once, do it without further prompting, because the reason is obvious as soon as it is stated and invisible until then.
The half-day nobody mentions
In several places the last working day of the week is short. Thursday in parts of the Gulf finishes early; Friday afternoon is thin in a lot of European offices; Saturday in places that work six days is often half a day.
This matters for one specific thing: the final approval. A request for a signature that arrives in the last two hours of somebody's short last day will not be signed, and will not be refused either. It will simply be there on their next working morning, and the intervening days are gone.
| Arriving at | Their next working hour | Lost |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday 15:00, a half-day office | Sunday 08:00 | about two and a half days |
| Thursday 10:00 | Thursday 11:00 | nothing |
| Friday 16:00, to a Mon–Fri office | Monday 09:00 | about two and a half days |
| Saturday, to a six-day office | Saturday | nothing |
Naming it in writing
The phrase "working day" in an email or a contract means a different set of days to each party, and almost nobody notices until it is expensive.
Where it matters — a notice period, a cure period, a delivery window — the fix is to say whose working days are meant. "Ten working days" is ambiguous. "Ten of your working days" and "ten of ours" are not, and on the weeks above they can differ by two days.
What not to do
Do not ask them to move. It is not available, it would not be granted, and asking makes the relationship worse for no gain.
Do not describe their week as a problem in front of them, or in writing. It is their ordinary week, it has been that way for a long time, and from where they are sitting the inconvenient week is yours.
And do not quietly absorb the difference by having somebody on your side work Sunday. That is a transfer rather than a solution, it is paid weekly by one person, and once it is established it is very hard to withdraw.
The overlap, stated plainly
For anybody who wants the numbers rather than the argument.
| Their week | Days of overlap with Mon–Fri | Which days are lost |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday to Thursday | Four | Their Friday, your Sunday |
| Monday to Saturday | Five | Their Saturday is spare, not lost |
| Tuesday to Saturday | Four | Your Monday, their Sunday |
| Saturday to Wednesday | Three | Your Thursday and Friday |
The second row is the only one that produces more working time rather than less, and it is the one that gets used least.
The fourth is rare and worth knowing about, because a three-day overlap behaves qualitatively differently: it is too narrow to absorb a holiday on either side, so any closure at all effectively removes the week.