Thursday at four

Field note. An approval sent at four on a Thursday afternoon in Riyadh or Cairo gets one of two answers.

The first is a yes that arrives in under a minute, which means it was not read. The second is nothing, until Sunday.

In Dubai the same thing happens a day later, at four on a Friday, and the silence runs to Monday.

Neither answer has anything to do with the quality of the request. The decision-maker is already at the weekend. Their attention left the office an hour before they did, and the request has landed in the gap between the working week and the family, where nothing is decided and everything is deferred.

The unread yes is the more dangerous of the two. It looks like an approval and it behaves like a postponement. On Sunday morning the decision-maker reads the thing properly for the first time and the questions begin, after the media has been booked and the creative has gone to the studio.

The silence at least tells the truth.

I have watched teams work until Thursday afternoon to make the deck right and then lose the decision to the clock. The deck was fine. It arrived when nobody was deciding.

The default, when nobody decides, is that the calendar decides. It settles more approvals than the argument does, and it never reads the deck.

The real deadline for a decision is a day earlier than the sender thinks. Wednesday at four in Riyadh, Thursday at four in Dubai, while the person who has to say yes is still in the week.