← Diary

September 5, 2024

How I send an executive a trip

Trip brief

Move a time and watch the checks rerun. Try pushing the 8:15am flight to 14:00, the way a delay would.

Mon 14 Apr▭
Mon 14 Apr✈
Mon 14 Apr▭
Mon 14 Apr▤

Arriving after 10pm. Tell the hotel or the room can go.

Tue 15 Apr▣
Tue 15 Apr▣
1 thing to fix

What lands in his inbox

MON 14 APR
   5:50am  Pickup, home to MIA
   8:15am  AA 100 MIA to LHR, seat 2A
  10:40pm  Pickup, LHR to hotel
  11:45pm  The Standard London, conf 7XQ2

TUE 15 APR
   9:00am  Breakfast with Hensley, hotel lobby
  10:15am  Site walk, King's Cross

That is the brief I send, with the checks running live. Push the 8:15am flight to 14:00 and watch the rest of the day fall over.

An executive does not want a folder of confirmation emails. He wants to know what time the car comes and whether he can take the earlier meeting.

So the trip goes out as one thing. Every segment on one page, in order, in his timezone, with the confirmation numbers where he can find them. If it does not fit on a phone screen without pinching, it is too long.

The part that matters is what happens before it gets sent. A flight lands at 22:40 and someone has booked a meeting at 23:15, and it looks fine in a calendar because a calendar does not know about customs. So I check the gaps rather than the entries. Anything under an hour after a landing, anything that overlaps, anything arriving after 10pm without the hotel being told. Those are the three that have actually bitten me.

Changes go out the same way. Not a forwarded airline email, a sentence saying what moved and what moved because of it. The flight slipping two hours also moves the car, the dinner, and whether the hotel still holds the room.