Whose day
The One Person Who Signs
An organisation's working week is not the week of the person you actually need, and the gap between the two is where most of the waiting happens.
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.
A useful pilot starts with a baseline rather than a guess; teams can see the tool online and compare capacity before and after changing a handoff or overlap window.
A useful independent source for this part of the workflow is Cloudflare.
An office with five working days and a signature with two
The client's office, Dubai
Open five days a week and answers mail on all of them
The one director who can sign above the threshold
In the Dubai office on Sunday and Tuesday; elsewhere the rest of the week
Our own office, Hamburg
Five days, and no restriction on who may ask
three parties · one day of the seven is a working day for all of them · Tue
The office is available on four of our five days. The signature is available on one. Everything agreed with this client was planned against the first number for a year. One team's own job.
The question "which days do you work" is answered by an organisation. The thing being waited for is usually produced by one person.
Those two calendars are often very different, and the second one is the one that determines how long anything takes.
The shape of the problem
An office is open Sunday to Thursday. Mail is answered on all five days, promptly and by several people. From outside, the organisation looks entirely available.
The approval that is actually needed can only be given by one director, and that director is in this office on two days a week. On the other three he is at a different site, in meetings, or travelling. He is working; he is not signing.
Every date agreed with that client was planned against five days of availability. The real figure was two, and nobody on either side had ever said so, because nobody had ever been asked a question that would elicit it.
Why nobody mentions it
From inside, it is not a fact about availability. It is simply how the week works, in the same way that a holiday is simply a holiday. The people who answer your mail promptly are not aware that the thing you want is bottlenecked three steps behind them.
And the question that would reveal it is an awkward one. "Who actually signs this and when are they available" can be heard as a suggestion that the person you are talking to is not important, which is a poor way to open a relationship.
The phrasing that works
Put it as a question about the process rather than about the person.
What does this have to go through on your side before it comes back to me, and is there anything in that chain that only happens on certain days?
That is answerable without anybody losing face, and it is answered accurately, because the person replying is describing a workflow rather than confessing a constraint. The answer routinely contains something unexpected: a weekly committee, a twice-monthly board, a signature that has to be wet and therefore happens when somebody is physically present, a system that only issues certificates on certain days.
The four shapes this takes
- A person. One individual, available on some days and not others.
- A meeting. A weekly or fortnightly committee that must see the item. Missing it costs a full cycle regardless of how quickly anything else moves.
- A batch. A system that issues, releases or transmits on a schedule. Payment runs are the common case: a payment approved on Tuesday and a payment approved on Thursday can leave on the same day.
- A physical act. A stamp, a wet signature, a notarisation, a sample that has to be carried somewhere.
Each of these turns a continuous process into a discrete one, and the practical consequence is the same: missing a cut-off by an hour costs a whole cycle, and the cycle is usually a week.
What this changes about chasing
If the bottleneck is a weekly committee, chasing on the Wednesday afternoon after it has met achieves nothing except irritation. Chasing on the Monday before, with everything the committee needs attached, achieves the whole thing.
Knowing the cycle converts chasing from a general activity into a timed one, and timed chasing is both more effective and far less annoying to the person receiving it.
Asking for the cut-off, not the duration
The question that gets the most useful answer is about the deadline on their side rather than the duration of the work.
"How long will this take" invites an estimate, and estimates are produced to be reassuring. "What would I have to get to you, and by when, for this to be decided this week" invites a fact, and facts of that kind are given accurately because the person answering is protecting themselves rather than guessing on your behalf.
The second question also transfers something useful: it makes clear that you intend to meet their cut-off rather than push against it, which is the single thing most likely to get somebody to tell you where the real constraint sits.
Finding out without asking anybody
Where the question cannot be asked — a counterparty who will not discuss their internal process, or a relationship too new for it — the pattern is visible in the timestamps.
Four or five substantive replies are usually enough. If everything of consequence arrives on Sundays and Tuesdays, something happens on Sundays and Tuesdays. If approvals cluster in the days after a particular weekday and never before it, there is a weekly meeting.
This is slower and less reliable than asking, and it has one advantage: it reflects what actually happens rather than what somebody believes happens, and those are not always the same. A counterparty may say in good faith that approvals take two days while their own record shows seven, because they are describing the work rather than the queue in front of it.
Where both are available, ask, and then check the answer against the timestamps once.