When Waiting Rooms Are Where Real Work Gets Done

The car is in for its service and the estimate says two hours. In the dealership's waiting area, under a television nobody is watching, a finance manager is approving supplier payments on her phone. Across the room someone is answering a client's question about a quote, thumbs moving quickly. Later the same day, in a doctor's waiting room or in the school pick-up queue, the pattern repeats.

Waiting rooms used to be dead time. For many people they have become the place where decisions get made, because there is nowhere else in the day to make them. This piece asks why that happens, what it costs, and what would let waiting time be waiting time again, or at least time that someone chooses to use.

Why decisions migrate to the gaps

The working day is full long before it starts. Meetings, calls, site visits and interruptions fill the hours at the desk. The things that need a moment of quiet thought, such as an approval, a reply to a difficult email or a check on a quote, get pushed out. They do not disappear. They wait for a gap.

The waiting room offers that gap. It is twenty minutes with nothing else expected, and a phone in hand. So the queued decisions come out, and get made on a small screen, with partial information, between announcements.

Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index report on the "infinite workday", based on aggregated Microsoft 365 signals, found that the most-interrupted users were interrupted every two minutes by a meeting, email or notification during core hours. Those figures are not South African and describe the heaviest-hit users, so they should be read as indicative. But they help explain why considered work leaves the desk: the desk is where interruptions happen, and the gaps elsewhere are where they do not.

This is related to, but different from, what Mellorca describes in why the commute has become unpaid triage time. The commute is a fixed part of every day. Waiting rooms are irregular and unplanned, which makes them harder to protect and easier to fill without noticing.

An illustrative day

Consider an illustrative case: the operations manager of a Pretoria logistics business with forty staff. It is a hypothetical scenario, not a real person. Her day is back-to-back: a depot visit in the morning, two client calls, a driver issue that takes an hour. Purchase approvals, a customer complaint that needs a careful reply and a supplier's revised rate card all wait.

At three she takes her son to a dental appointment. In the forty minutes in the waiting room she approves four purchase orders, answers the complaint and skims the rate card. She is reasonably confident about three of the approvals. The fourth she approves because the supplier is waiting and she cannot open the attached spreadsheet properly on her phone.

Nothing about this is unusual. It is also not obviously wrong. But it shows how the quality of a decision can come to depend on where someone happens to be sitting when they find time to make it.

The human tax: time and energy

The time tax is straightforward. Time that would otherwise be idle, restful or simply one's own is spent on work. For some people that is a fair trade they would choose freely. For others it is the only way to keep up.

The energy tax is less visible. Making decisions in fragments, in noisy places, with incomplete information, takes effort. Some of that effort is spent not on the decision itself but on re-loading the context each time: what was this approval for, what did we agree last time, where is the attachment. Mellorca has looked at the business cost of that switching in the cost of interruptions and context switching.

We should be cautious about claiming more than this. We do not know how any particular person feels in a waiting room, and some people find a quick burst of approvals satisfying. The narrower claim is that when decisions can only happen in fragments, the person making them has lost some control over when and how they think.

Why the phone is not the problem

It would be easy to blame mobile access. That would miss the point. Being able to approve something from a phone is genuinely useful, and for an urgent payment it can prevent real harm. The problem is not that the phone makes work possible in the waiting room. It is that the working day leaves no other place for it.

There is also a design question. Many decisions arrive on a phone without the context needed to make them well. An approval request that says "PO 4471, R38,000, please approve" asks the approver either to trust it blindly or to go and find the background, which on a phone may be impractical.

What could realistically change

Protect decision time at the desk. A short, recurring block in the day for approvals and considered replies, treated like a meeting, gives queued decisions a home other than the next gap.
Put the context in the request. Approval tools can carry the information an approver needs. Microsoft's Power Automate documentation, for example, describes approval requests that approvers can respond to from an Outlook email, a Teams card or an action centre. That is only helpful if the request includes the supplier, amount, reason and budget position, not just a reference number.
Move routine decisions down. If a purchase within an agreed budget and value limit can be approved by someone else, it never needs to reach the waiting room. Mellorca's insight on why approval processes become bottlenecks covers how approval limits are usually set.
Decide what can wait. Many items feel urgent because they arrive with a notification. A shared understanding of what genuinely cannot wait until tomorrow removes some of the pressure to clear everything immediately.
Secure the devices properly. If phones are going to be used for approvals, they need to be managed like any other business device. The UK National Cyber Security Centre's device guidance covers how organisations choose, configure and manage devices used for work.

What changes first, and the business outcome

The first change is that fewer decisions are waiting. Routine approvals have gone elsewhere. The ones that remain have a protected slot in the day, and the ones that arrive on a phone carry enough information to be decided properly.

For the business, that means fewer approvals made blind, fewer suppliers waiting, and less dependence on one person finding a gap. Decisions are made with the right information, which matters more than where they are made.

The human dividend

The dividend is time, and with it the choice of what to do with a waiting room. Someone who wants to clear a few emails while the car is serviced still can. Someone who would rather read, call a friend, talk to their child or simply sit can do that too, without a backlog pressing on them.

There is a second, quieter dividend. Decisions made at a time and place chosen for them tend to be made with more care. The operations manager in our illustration would not need to approve the fourth purchase order on trust. That is good for the business, and it also spares her the small, nagging uncertainty that follows a decision made in a hurry.

The trade-offs

Some people like the gaps. Clearing small items in dead time can feel efficient and leave the desk free for bigger work. The aim is choice, not a ban.
Mobile approval tools can extend work further. Making approvals easier on a phone can also make them easier at dinner or on holiday. Clear expectations about response times matter as much as the tool.
Delegation transfers risk. Moving approvals to others requires limits, training and some tolerance of decisions the manager might have made differently.
A protected block can be invaded. Unless colleagues respect it, decision time at the desk becomes another slot for meetings.
Some roles are genuinely mobile. For people who spend most of the day on the road, phones may always be the main tool. For them, the context-rich request matters most.

Why it matters

Waiting is one of the few parts of modern life that nobody schedules. That has made it a convenient overflow for work that the working day cannot hold. Moving considered decisions back to a place designed for them does more than tidy a process. It gives back a small piece of unclaimed time, and the freedom to decide what that time is for, including nothing at all.

Mellorca has explored a related experience in why waiting for information feels like working. The two are connected: when information arrives complete and decisions have a home, waiting can go back to being just waiting.

Sources and further reading

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/breaking-down-infinite-workday (last verified 10 October 2026)
Get started with Power Automate approvals - Power Automate (last verified 10 October 2026)
Device security guidance (last verified 10 October 2026)