If you are the person who gets called every time something breaks, the problem is not your availability.
The judgment lives in one place
Somebody calls at two in the morning. A system is down. Which system, how bad is it, who owns that area, is this the kind of thing that waits until morning, who is on vacation this week.
Those questions get answered by whoever holds the whole picture. In most small companies that is one person, and every call routes to them because no alternative path exists.
The person on the receiving end usually reads this as a workload problem and tries to solve it by being more available. Availability is not the constraint. The absence of a written rule is.
Every call came to me
The warehouses ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year, excluding Christmas and a couple of other holidays.
An operation like that needs somebody to call at three in the morning. Not somebody who might answer. Somebody whose job at that moment is to answer.
For a long stretch, that was me. Every call came to me, and I decided who got contacted, who got woken up, and what could wait. Every time, for anything.
I was not doing anyone a favor by absorbing it. I was the single point through which every night-time decision had to pass, and a single point that needs sleep is a design flaw rather than a virtue.
A form and somebody paid to follow it
We set up a help desk, run by US Technical Services. Somebody there answered the call, worked through a routing form, and contacted the right person directly.
This system failed, that system failed, here is who gets called. Not a platform, not an on-call product, and certainly not anything with intelligence in it. A form, and a person following it at three in the morning.
I stopped being woken for every small error, and the person who could fix the problem got contacted first rather than second.
One page, less than people expect
Less than people expect. The failure types you see in practice, which is a shorter list than anyone believes before they write it down. Who owns each one. Who gets called if that person does not answer. What can wait until morning and what cannot.
It fits on a page. The hard part is admitting how few distinct situations there really are, because the person holding the judgment experiences each night as unique.
They are not unique. Most on-call decisions repeat, and the exceptions are rare enough that a form can say escalate to the manager for anything not listed.
The costs nobody counts
More than the sleep, and the other costs are the ones nobody counts.
Every call routed through one person adds delay, because the call reaches a hop before it reaches a fixer. At two in the morning that delay is the difference between an incident and an outage.
It also means nobody else learns to make the decision. The judgment stays in one head, and the longer it stays there the harder it becomes to write down, because the person holding it stops noticing they are applying rules at all.
And it hides the pattern. When one person absorbs everything, nobody sees that the same three systems generate most of the calls, because there is no record.
Start with the last ten calls
Write down the last ten calls you took and who should have taken each one. That takes an hour and produces the first draft of the form.
Most people are surprised by how much repetition appears, and by how many of those calls had an obvious owner who was not contacted.
Then add the two or three cases that really are yours. Those exist and should be named, because a form that pretends the manager is never needed will be ignored the first time it is wrong.
The goal is not to remove yourself from every call. It is to be called for the ones that need you, which turns out to be a small fraction of what currently arrives.
The full article is on my site: https://thewritingking.com/the-manager-as-routing-layer/. It runs longer, carries the diagrams, and answers the questions readers ask most.
These are AI-made summaries of longer articles on my site, written with AI assistance from my own interviews and my own career. Nothing goes out that I have not read and approved.