When Your Workday Is Scripted by Other People's Deadlines

Some working days feel full and strangely empty at once. At five o'clock the person has answered forty messages, approved a dozen requests, joined four calls and supplied three reports. They were busy from start to finish. Ask what they chose to work on, and the honest answer might be: nothing, really. Everything came from somewhere else.

That is what a scripted workday looks like. The script is written by other people's deadlines: a supplier waiting for sign-off, a colleague who needs a figure by three, a customer who wants a reply before close of business. Each request is reasonable. The cumulative effect is that the person's own priorities never get a turn. This piece looks at how that happens, what it costs, and what a small business can change.

How a day gets scripted

Two channels do most of the scripting: approvals and the inbox.

Approvals put a person in the path of other people's work. A purchase order, a leave request, an invoice or a price exception all sit in someone's queue until they act. The approver's day is therefore arranged around when requests arrive, not around what they planned.

The inbox turns every sender's urgency into the recipient's agenda. A message arrives with a deadline attached by someone else, and the reader decides whether to respond now or risk being the bottleneck.

Research by Gloria Mark and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, observed office workers and found that they were interrupted frequently and often switched to a different activity before finishing the first. Microsoft's Work Trend Index, using aggregated Microsoft 365 data, describes a working day heavily shaped by meetings, email and chat, with many people reporting too little uninterrupted focus time. Both bodies of research describe general knowledge work, not any one South African business, but they match what many owners and managers say about their days.

An illustrative scenario

Consider an illustrative example, not a real case: the operations manager of a Durban distribution company with forty staff.

In this scenario the manager is the approver for purchase requests, overtime, delivery exceptions and supplier queries. Requests arrive by email and WhatsApp throughout the day, each with its own deadline: a truck is waiting, a client has asked for a revised quote, a supplier needs confirmation before the cut-off.

The manager has a list of things they want to do this week: renegotiate a transport contract, review route costs, coach a new supervisor. None of it has a deadline imposed by somebody else, so none of it happens. Days are spent responding. The contract is renewed unchanged because it is easier.

The manager is not lazy or disorganised. They are doing exactly what the system asks of them, and the system has no room in it for their own judgement about what matters.

The human tax: autonomy and energy

The first tax is autonomy. When most of a person's working time is claimed by requests, they have little say over the shape of their own day. This is a form of control in the sense used by the UK Health and Safety Executive's management standards for work-related stress, which treat the amount of say people have over how they work as one of the key areas that affect wellbeing. The standard is general, not a finding about any particular role, but it names the issue.

The second tax is energy. Responding is tiring in a particular way. Each message demands a decision, a switch of context, and a small act of risk assessment: does this need me now? By the evening there is nothing left for the work the person actually wanted to do.

This connects to the lunch break eaten by approval requests, which looks at how approvals spill into breaks, and to why some people never get an uninterrupted hour, which covers the attention side.

What could realistically change

The aim is not to ignore other people's deadlines. Most are real. It is to make sure the person is not the only mechanism by which they are met.

Batch approvals on purpose. Agree two fixed times a day when approvals are cleared, and tell the people who submit them. Most requests tolerate a few hours. The ones that do not need a clearly agreed route.
Set rules so routine requests do not need a person. Mellorca's article on approving low-risk transactions one by one argues for limits below which approval is automatic. Microsoft's documentation on approval workflows in Business Central shows how approval limits and delegates can be configured in standard software.
Name a delegate. Approval workflows can route to a stand-in when the approver is unavailable. A queue that waits for one person is a script with a single actor.
Make deadlines visible at the source. A request that states what it needs, by when and what happens if it is late is easier to triage than one that only says urgent.
Protect planned time. Put the person's own priorities in the diary as real appointments. Microsoft's research on meeting-free days, reported by MIT Sloan Management Review, suggests that protected days can improve autonomy and reduce stress for some teams, although results depend on how they are introduced.
Close the loop on status. If requesters can see where their request is, they ask less. Mellorca's piece on what changes when status updates stop being a chore covers that.

The first consequence, and the business outcome

The first consequence is that the approver's day contains stretches that belong to them. They decide when to deal with the queue and when to do the work that only they can do.

The business outcome is faster, more predictable approvals, because rules and delegates handle routine cases, and better decisions on the important ones, because someone has the time to think. The renegotiated transport contract in our scenario becomes possible.

The human dividend

The dividend is autonomy: a measure of control over the order and pace of the working day. For some people that is a morning without messages. For others it is leaving on time. The point is that the day belongs to the person more than it did, and the choice about how to use it is theirs.

The trade-offs

Batching slows some requests. A supplier or customer who is used to an instant answer may notice a delay. That has to be agreed, not imposed.
Automatic approval needs controls. Rules below a limit can allow mistakes or abuse unless there are reports and audit trails. Fewer approvals should not mean less oversight.
Delegation moves load. A delegate gains the script the approver lost, so it must be shared fairly.
Some work really is reactive. Dispatch, service desks and emergency repairs cannot be fully planned. The aim is to reduce unnecessary scripting, not to pretend it away.

Why it matters

When a person's day is entirely written by other people, their judgement is used only to decide which request to answer first. That is a poor use of an experienced manager, and a tiring way to work.

Mellorca's reading is measured. Deadlines are a legitimate part of working with others. But a business that routes every one of them through a single person, by email, is choosing a script. It can choose a different one.

Sources and further reading

https://ics.uci.edu/~gmark/chi08-mark.pdf (last verified 10 October 2026)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/breaking-down-infinite-workday (last verified 10 October 2026)
Management Standards - Control - HSE (last verified 10 October 2026)
Approve or reject documents in workflows - Business Central (last verified 10 October 2026)