Whose day
The Six-Day Week on the Other Side
A supplier who works Saturday has given you a day you do not use, because nothing is ever sent from here to arrive on it.
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.
To keep remote-work decisions transparent, teams can find out how it works and discuss the resulting patterns together instead of treating activity as a private managerial score.
For broader context beyond this collection, see the resources published by AWS.
Three parties on one order, and what Saturday is worth
Your team, Hamburg
Saturday is nobody's working day here, and nothing is read
The fabrication shop, Taipei
Saturday is an ordinary production day and always has been
The forwarder's Shenzhen office
Saturday is a working day for bookings but not for customs
three parties · five days of the seven are working days for all of them · Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri
The two six-day rows between them add a working day that this side has never used, because nothing ever leaves here on a Friday evening addressed to it. One team's own job.
A six-day week on the other side is the one calendar difference that works in your favour, and it is almost universally wasted.
The shape of the waste is simple. Their Saturday is a working day. Nothing is ever sent from here to land on it, because here it is a Saturday, and so the extra day disappears into a weekend at this end.
Where the day goes
Consider a question that occurs to somebody on a Friday afternoon.
Sent at four on Friday, it arrives on the other side late on their Friday evening and is read on Saturday morning, which is an ordinary working day there. The answer is written on Saturday and is waiting here on Monday.
Not sent — because it is Friday afternoon and it can wait until Monday — it is sent on Monday morning, read on Monday evening, answered on Tuesday, and arrives here on Tuesday. Two days have been spent, and the only difference between the two cases was whether somebody pressed send before going home.
Why it does not happen
Nobody is withholding the message. The chain of reasoning on this side runs: it is late on Friday, this is not urgent, I will deal with it properly on Monday, and in any case nobody will look at it over the weekend.
The last clause is the error, and it is an error about somebody else's calendar rather than about the work. It is also completely invisible, because the cost of it never appears anywhere: the question gets answered on Tuesday, which is fine, and nobody counts the Saturday that was available.
The small habit that recovers it
Keep a short list of which counterparties work Saturday, and let the Friday end-of-day sweep send to those first.
That is all. It does not require anybody to work a Saturday here, it does not require a process, and it does not need to be perfect — half the questions going out a few hours earlier recovers most of the available day.
| Sent | Their working day | Answer available here |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday afternoon | Friday | Friday |
| Friday 16:00 | Saturday | Monday |
| Friday 19:00 or later | Monday | Monday evening |
| Monday 09:00 | Monday | Tuesday |
The second and third rows are the interesting ones. The difference between them is three hours of one Friday, and it is a full working day at the far end.
The side of it that is not an advantage
A six-day week is somebody's six-day week. It is worth being careful about what gets assumed from it.
A supplier who works Saturday is not more available; they are working more days for the same output, often with the same people. Treating their Saturday as spare capacity — routinely sending the week's awkward requests to land on it — is a real imposition even if nobody on either side ever says so.
The distinction is between using a day that is already a working day in the ordinary way, and converting it into the day on which everything difficult arrives.
What to check before relying on it
Not every part of a six-day organisation works six days, and the difference matters when the thing you need is not production.
In the panel above the forwarder's office takes bookings on Saturday and cannot clear customs on it, because the customs office is closed. A factory may run the floor on Saturday while the commercial team, the quality department and whoever signs certificates are all absent.
So the question to ask is not "do you work Saturdays" but "is the person who does this particular thing there on Saturday". The answers are often different, and the second one is the one that determines whether a Friday send is worth anything.
What this adds up to
A six-day counterparty gives a Monday-to-Friday team roughly fifty extra working days a year at the far end of the chain, and most teams use almost none of them.
Recovering even a third of that costs nothing but a reordering of what leaves on a Friday afternoon, which is the cheapest thing in this collection by a wide margin and the one most reliably left undone.
What a six-day week does to lead times
Worth separating from the Friday habit, because it changes a number rather than a routine.
A quoted lead time of twenty working days means four calendar weeks on a five-day week and about three and a half on a six-day one. Over a long order the difference accumulates to several days in the supplier's favour, which is part of why distant suppliers with six-day weeks often quote shorter lead times than their nearer competitors.
It also means their queue clears faster, so a slot missed on a six-day week comes round sooner than the equivalent on a five-day one. A supplier who says the next slot is in eight days is describing six working days rather than eight, and that is a better position than it sounds.
None of this is worth much on its own. It is worth knowing when comparing two quotations whose lead times are stated in different units, which happens more often than anybody notices.