Waiting time: what it means
By Soumen Sarkar · October 2026
Waiting time is the time work spends stopped for a person: from the moment a question, assumption or handoff needs someone until they act on it.
Waiting time measures how long work sits still because it needs a person. It is one of the measures a team at agent pace watches, together with rework and pick-up time, because at this pace waiting is the most expensive thing a team can do.
Count it from the moment something needs a person to the moment they act:
- An agent stops to ask a question, until someone answers.
- An assumption is stated, until someone confirms or corrects it.
- Work is ready for review, until someone looks at it.
The first case is the one to remove entirely. An agent that states an assumption and keeps going adds no waiting time to its own work, even if the answer takes an hour. What's left to watch is how long assumptions stay unconfirmed, because that is how long a possible mistake goes unseen.
For example, an agent on a hypothetical team stalls at 10:05 asking whether refunds go to the original card. The engineer running it is in a meeting until 11:00. That's 55 minutes of waiting time, during which a dozen other changes landed around it.
Campfyrr shows parts of this in the "What Campfyrr caught for your team this week" card on Activity: questions answered from the record, and assumptions stated instead of stopping to ask.
The principle behind this: Keep moving: The work never waits, and neither do we.
Related: Pick-up time · Rework · Activity
Questions that use it
Move as one at agent speed. Nobody waits. Add Campfyrr to Claude: it briefs every agent before it touches the code, keeps assumptions and handoffs where the team can see them, and never takes your code (what it keeps).