Most projects slip because the job spends too much time waiting. 

Waiting on an RFI answer. 
Waiting on a submittal review. 
Waiting on an approval. 
Waiting on a “yes” that’s buried three replies deep. 

And the brutal part is that waiting often looks like… nothing happening. Until the field is standing around. 

The real culprit: slow decisions hiding in plain sight 

RFIs are a perfect example because they’re basically “we can’t move until someone answers this.” 

Navigant Construction Forum reviewed Aconex data across 1,362 projects and found 1,083,807 RFIs — an average of 796 RFIs per project.  

That’s not an edge case. That’s normal work. 

Now look at the response time: average first response around 6.4 days, and the median around 9.7 days (and it climbs on longer projects).  

So when someone says “it was just one RFI”… they’re ignoring the math. 

One “small” unanswered question can quietly add a week. Now multiply it by hundreds. 

Why it turns into delays (even when everyone is working hard) 

Because the decision cycle lives in messy channels: 

• email threads 

• forwarded chains 

• “quick” side conversations 

• attachments with comments nobody owned 

And when decision-making gets scattered like that, you don’t just lose time, you create rework.

In a PlanGrid + FMI study, miscommunication and “bad data” were linked to major rework waste (including a reported $31.3B/year in rework costs). 

Zoom out further: Autodesk + FMI estimated $1.84T globally lost in 2020 due to bad data including rework, change-orders, and claims. 

This is why projects slip: Because the work that unblocks the schedule gets trapped where it’s hardest to control. 

What “waiting” looks like in the real week 

You’ve seen these: 

1) The approval that comes back… but nobody owns it 
Submittal returns with comments. It’s in a chain. Everyone assumes someone else is driving it. 

2) The RFI answer that changes sequencing 
It’s technically “resolved,” but the install plan doesn’t change because the key line is buried in a thread. 

3) The vendor lead-time update that should trigger a re-plan 
Dates shift. Nobody converts it into actions. The schedule stays optimistic until it’s too late. 

That’s how you get the worst kind of surprise: 
The one you should’ve seen coming. 

The fix: shorten the decision loop (and make it visible) 

High-performing PMs don’t “manage email better.” 

They do something simpler: 

They pull schedule-impact work out of email and make it trackable. 

Here’s the playbook: 

1) Treat approvals and RFIs like schedule items, not messages 

If it can move the date, it gets: 

• an owner 

• a due date 

• a follow-up 

2) Make “awaiting reply” a real status 

Not a vibe. A list. 

3) Run your look-ahead from pending decisions.

Not just milestones. 
Not just meetings. 

4) Kill the “someone saw it” assumption 

If it matters, one person owns it. Always. 

Where Belt fits (without changing how clients email you) 

Belt sits on top of Outlook/Gmail and calendar and does the part teams don’t have time to do consistently:

• surfaces RFIs, submittals, approvals, and “awaiting reply” threads 

• turns them into owned actions (owner + due date + thread attached) 

• builds a weekly look-ahead that updates as new work hits the inbox 

So schedule-critical decisions stop living as “messages.” They become managed work.

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