Until after Eid

Every question raised this week gets the same answer, and the answer is three words long.

Until after Eid.

The pricing decision. The agency review. The hire. The packaging that has been wrong since January. The conversation about who actually owns the calendar. All of it goes into the same place, and the place is not a date. Nobody writes it down. Nobody will be reminded of it. It is a way of ending a conversation that has the manners of scheduling.

I have never seen a team decide to do this, and I understand why it happens. The alternative, in the last week of the month, is a decision taken by people who are hungry, short of sleep and about to be on holiday, and everyone in the room knows it. Deferring is the sensible move. The trouble is that after Eid is a place, not a time, and nothing that goes to a place comes back on a day.

What comes next is predictable. The holiday ends, and everything that left in the last week arrives back at once, in the same three days, at the same tired desks, with the two new things the holiday created sitting on top of the pile. So the pile gets triaged rather than decided, and the packaging is still wrong in June.

The only decisions I have watched come back from after Eid are the ones that left with a date on them. Not a promise to revisit. A day, a name, and somewhere it was written down.

Everything else was not postponed. It was dropped politely.