Where an order spends its time
A customer emails for a quote on a Monday afternoon. Thirteen days later the invoice goes out. Somewhere in there, people did the work.
Scroll through the whole thing at one pixel per minute. Green is someone actually working on the order. Grey stripes are the order waiting inside the business. Pale is time that belongs to someone else: the customer deciding, the truck driving.
This order is made up. The steps are ordinary ones. At the bottom you can put in your own.
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The order, added up
None of the waiting is anyone's fault. It is what happens when every step is done well by someone who then hands it to a queue. The inbox, the sign-off, the credit hold, the batch that prints tomorrow, the billing run on Friday. Each one is reasonable on its own. Together they are most of the order.
That is why making people work faster barely moves the total. Shaving five minutes off picking saves five pixels. Removing one overnight handoff saves a thousand.
Try your own order
One row per step, in order. Durations in minutes or hours. Press rebuild and scroll back up.
The example order is illustrative, not measured from any business. The durations are chosen to be unremarkable, not dramatic. Clock times run on the calendar, nights and weekends included, because that is the clock the customer is on. Highland Willow, 2026-10-29.
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