The month that vanished into Fridays off

This is going out while I'm away, which makes me part of the problem I'm about to describe.

Something changed about summer this year and it took me until August to work out what it was. Holiday patterns have shifted. Where clients used to disappear for a fortnight in July and come back with a tan and a full inbox, this year it's been a day here, a long weekend there, a Friday joined to the Monday after it, and sometimes a bigger trip on top of all that. Roughly the same amount of leave, cut into much smaller pieces.

I think it's a better way to take time off. Splitting it up means the rest lands, and it lands more often, whereas a fortnight in one go spends its first three days on decompression and its last two on dread. I've been doing more of it myself. It has also done something strange to project pace, and it took me a while to see it, as nothing about it looks like a problem while it's happening.

Nobody worked fewer hours

Take Fred (which isn't his name). He's a client with several projects running with us, and he's engaged, responsive and good at his job. Over the past few weeks he's built up a set of questions for us, the sort that need a proper conversation.

The first time, we agreed to pick them up later in the week. Then something came up on his side and it moved to the following week, as he had the Friday and Monday off. That week I was away for a couple of days. The week after, he was off on a longer trip.

A month has gone by and we still haven't had the conversation.

Nobody dropped the ball here. There's no unanswered email, no missed deadline, no moment you could point at and say that's where it went wrong. Everyone worked a full month and the projects moved. But a set of decisions that should have taken a fortnight to resolve has taken four times that, and it happened so quietly that neither of us noticed until I went back through the thread.

Nobody sets an out of office for a Friday

When someone books two weeks off, everyone knows. The out of office goes on, the team routes around it, and the person going away does something valuable in the run-up: they clear the decks. They chase the answers they've been waiting on and sign off whatever's still open, and anything they can't close gets handed to somebody who can. A fortnight's leave works as a forcing function. It turns open questions into decisions, as deferring them past the holiday is obviously expensive.

A single Friday forces nothing. There's no run-up and no handover, as neither feels warranted for one day, and deferring a question from Thursday to Tuesday costs nothing anybody can see. Which would be fine, except it's happening on both sides of the relationship at once, over and over, and the small deferrals compound into a delay none of the individual decisions would ever have justified. The absence is the same size as it always was. The discipline that used to travel with it has gone.

The arithmetic is worse than it feels

Here's the bit that surprised me when I sat down and worked it out.

Say Fred is available four days out of five, and I'm available four out of five. The overlap where we're both free comes to 64%, which is lower than most people guess. Add a third person who needs to be in that conversation, which for anything touching budget or scope is normal, and you're down to about half.

Block leave concentrates all of that unavailability into a single window everyone can see coming and plan around. Fragmented leave scatters it, so the gaps never line up twice in the same place. You don't lose the days off. You lose the intersections, and the intersections are where decisions get made.

What we're changing

You can't fix a client's leave pattern, and I wouldn't want to. Pushing people back towards banking a fortnight in July would be a miserable answer to a problem that sits on our side of the fence. The fix belongs in how projects are designed, and specifically in how much they lean on one named person being reachable at an unpredictable moment.

The first change is batching. If four questions have built up, we hold them for a scheduled slot. Chasing them one at a time just gives each one its own opportunity to slip, and a fragmented calendar will happily swallow six small conversations while struggling to swallow one big one.

Then there's the decision default with an expiry date on it. "We're proceeding with option A unless we hear otherwise by Thursday" puts the cost of silence where it belongs. Nine times out of ten option A was fine anyway, and most clients would far rather we kept moving while they were off the grid.

The one everybody skips is naming a deputy for each decision area at kick-off. It feels like overkill when the absence in question is a single Friday, which is why nobody sets it up, and why that Friday ends up costing a week.

We've also changed what we watch. Tracking whether work is on schedule tells you about deliverables, and deliverables can sit green all month while a month's worth of decisions quietly ages behind them. A question that's been open for three weeks is a red flag on its own terms.

None of which is clever. It's just admitting the calendar changed.

The bit worth taking away

Fragmented leave is a better pattern for the people taking it, and it isn't going back. What it has exposed is an assumption buried deep in how most projects run: that the people making decisions are reachable on roughly normal notice. That held when absence arrived in visible, planned blocks. It falls apart when absence is scattered across the calendar in single days nobody announces.

If your projects have felt slower this summer without anything obviously going wrong, this might be why. Go and look at how long your open questions have been open. Your milestone tracker won't show you that one.

Fred's questions, incidentally, are still open. I'm away this week.