Whose day
Writing the Other Side's Week Down, Once
The answer to a question about somebody else's calendar is learned repeatedly by different people unless it is written somewhere a stranger would look.
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 cross-border schedule is easier to manage when availability is grounded in evidence; details are available here provides a practical reference for time, activity, and project reporting.
For a separate reference on calendars, standards, or international operations, consult Salesforce.
The same question, asked of the same supplier, by four different people
A delivery date, asked in March
7 / 4Three of the seven days were not working days on their side: the supplier's Saturday is a working day and their Monday is not. Asked and answered in March, recorded in one person's mailbox
The same question, asked in May by a colleague
7 / 4Three of the seven days were not working days on their side: the same non-working Monday. The answer existed in March and was not available to anybody in May
The same question, asked in August by a third person
8 / 4Four of the eight days were not working days on their side: the same Monday, plus one day of August shutdown. By now three people had been told separately
The same question, asked in November after the first person left
9 / 4Five of the nine days were not working days on their side: the same Monday, and nobody left who knew. The knowledge went out of the building in October
four waits · 31 calendar days · 16 of them working days on the other side
One fact, learned four times, by four people, at the cost of about a day each time. The fact had not changed since March. One team's own job.
A fact about somebody else's working week gets learned several times by several people, because the first person to learn it put it in a place only they can find.
The fix is a paragraph in the right location, and the right location is not the place it was learned.
What the record has to contain
Four things, and no more, because a longer form does not get filled in.
| Field | Why it earns its line |
|---|---|
| Working days | The thing most often assumed wrongly |
| Known closures, with dates | Holidays, shutdowns, audits, the annual conference |
| Where the real bottleneck sits | The person, meeting or batch that actually decides |
| When this was last checked, and by whom | Everything above expires |
The last row is the one people leave out, and it is what makes the rest usable. A note with no date on it is trusted indefinitely, including for the three years after it stopped being true.
Where to put it
Wherever the counterparty's name already appears for other reasons.
If there is a supplier record, it goes in the supplier record. If there is a project page, the first section. If there is nothing, a shared document named after the counterparty is enough — the test is not elegance but whether somebody who has never met this supplier would find it in the course of doing the thing they are about to do.
What does not work, in descending order of how reasonable it looks:
- The email thread where it was said. Nobody else knows the thread exists.
- A personal note. It leaves with the person.
- A chat channel. Searchable in principle, unfindable in practice after a month.
- A calendar entry. Shows the closure and not the reasoning, and only to whoever is invited.
The cost of not doing it
The panel above is one supplier and one fact over nine months. Four people each spent about a day discovering that a Monday was not a working day there.
None of those four did anything wrong. Each of them had a date to agree and no reason to believe the information existed. The fourth one could not have asked the first, because the first had left in October and took it with her.
What to write when the answer is uncertain
Record the uncertainty rather than rounding it to a fact.
"They have said Sunday to Thursday; we have twice had answers on a Friday, so this may be a department thing" is more useful than either of the clean versions of it. The next person can act on it and can see how much weight it will bear.
The same applies to the source. "Told to us by their project manager in March" and "inferred from timestamps" are both legitimate entries and should not look identical, because one of them is worth checking and the other is not.
Keeping it current without a process
Nobody is going to review these quarterly, and a system that depends on somebody doing so will last two quarters.
What does work is attaching the update to a moment that already happens: whenever a date is agreed with that counterparty, the person agreeing it glances at the record, and if anything in it turned out to be wrong, they fix the line. That is five seconds, it happens exactly when the information is being used, and it is the only point at which anybody has both the motive and the knowledge.
What this is worth
It is not a large saving on any single occasion. A day here, half a day there, a date promised accurately rather than optimistically.
What makes it worth doing is that it compounds in the opposite direction from most record-keeping. Calendars are stable. A working week written down in March is still right in November, and usually still right the following March, which is more than can be said for almost anything else anybody writes down about a counterparty.
What it is not for
Two uses to avoid, because they turn a useful record into a liability.
It is not a performance file. A note saying that a supplier is slow, unresponsive or difficult has no place in it: the record exists so that dates can be planned accurately, and mixing judgement into it means it will eventually be read by somebody it was not written for.
It is not a substitute for asking. A three-year-old entry is a starting point for a question, not an answer. Working weeks change, people leave, offices move and a company bought by another company inherits the buyer's calendar.
The entry that works reads like a timetable and not like an opinion: what days, what closures, who decides, when it was checked. Anything that could embarrass either side if forwarded belongs somewhere else, or nowhere.