Field note
Keep a wait column a chart can actually read
Pencil in the gutter is enough. A fair copy made at midnight is how Tuesday’s pile disappears before the plate is drawn.
A wait column is not a second ledger. In a clinic it is often a mark in the gutter of the appointment book: a tick, a number of minutes, a “late” in Georgian. In a hotel it may be the minutes between a walk-in and a key. In a salon it is the time a colour waits under a dryer while the next chair is still finishing a cut.
What ruins a plate is the fair copy. Someone decides the book looks messy, sits down after closing, and writes a clean sheet from memory. Tuesday’s cluster becomes four even ticks. The chart then shows a polite wave, and the hygienist who lived Tuesday does not recognise the month.
If you think you may commission a service performance report, leave the pencil. Put a clip on the first day of the period. If a day was not marked, leave it blank. We would rather draw a gap than a guessed average.
For handover, a photograph of two facing pages is enough for the figure review. We will tell you if the marks are readable. If they are not, that is a reason for a collection visit, not for recopying the quarter in a new notebook.