Ten things that never expire

Twenty-six of the thirty-six steps in this map are on a clock. Ten are not.

Once one of the ten is done it stays done, and that single property makes them behave unlike everything else in the record.

What keeps and what does not

• solid: days of waiting
• bracket: days it stays good
• open arrow: it never expires

Ten steps drawn; nine of them keep for good; one takes longer to get than it then lasts.

Nine steps that never expire, drawn with an open arrow, and one that expires in half the time it takes to get. To compare the map with real work patterns, reviewers can compare the product with your policy and define the decision, access rules and review date in advance.

The ten

Three money steps, three file steps, two brought papers, two appointments.

What they have in common

Two of them are registrations, which are permanent by nature: a tax number and a bank account do not lapse because time has passed. A wider policy and evidence perspective is available from World Economic Forum.

Two are events. An interview that happened, happened; fingerprints that were taken were taken. Events are the one category in this map that cannot be provisional and also cannot go stale, which is an unusual pairing.

The rest are either facts about a document that does not change, or stages of the file itself.

What none of them are is a statement about a person's current circumstances. Everything in this map that attests to a current situation — where you live, what you earn, what you are covered for, who owns the place — has a clock on it, and everything that attests to something fixed does not.

The map's expiry dates are not arbitrary. A document expires when it claims something that could have changed, and does not when it claims something that could not.

Why this is the useful half

Because there is exactly one category of step in this map that can safely be done as early as possible, and it is this one.

Everything else obtained early is being spent. A paper that keeps for ninety days, fetched on the first morning, has a third of its life gone before the rings above it have been entered.

The ten have no such cost. They can be obtained at the first opportunity, held indefinitely, and produced whenever they are wanted.

The two that are worth doing first

Of the ten, the passport copy and the qualification certificate are the only two that wait on nothing, so they are the only two that can actually be obtained at the first opportunity. The other eight sit behind things that are themselves blocked.

The passport copy takes one day, never expires, and eleven steps wait on it. There is nothing else in the map with that profile.

The one that proves the rule by breaking it

The tenth row of the panel above is not one of the ten. A place in the queue expires in thirty days and takes sixty to obtain, which makes it the only step in the record whose life is shorter than its wait.

It is included in the drawing so that the open arrows have something to be compared against. Nine steps with no end at all, and one that runs out before you reach it.

A permanent thing and a thing that expires before it arrives are the two ends of this map's clock, and both of them are in the same family of errands.

Permanence by family

Two families have no permanent members at all, and both of them are families of attestation: a place asserts a current arrangement, a made paper asserts the current state of a document. Neither kind of claim survives time passing.

The money family has the most, because three of its six members are enrolments rather than claims. The file has three because a lodged file, a decision and a renewal are events.

That gives a rule of thumb which holds across the whole map without exception: enrolments and events never expire, and claims about circumstances always do.

There is no step in this record that expires for any reason other than that the thing it asserts could have stopped being true.

What the ten cost together

Two hundred and twenty-seven days of waiting, done one at a time — which nobody does, because eight of the ten can run alongside each other.

The useful figure is the slowest: the decision, at ninety days. Everything else in the permanent group finishes well inside it.

So the whole permanent half of this map could be complete in a quarter of a year, and the part of it that can genuinely be banked in advance — the passport copy and the qualification certificate — takes a fortnight.

What the ten are not

They are not what anybody requires, and no office, country or kind of permission appears on this map. The days and the expiry figures are the map's own round numbers, chosen so that the arithmetic of a ring can be seen at all.

What transfers is the division. In any system of this kind, the documents that assert a fixed fact can be stockpiled and the documents that assert a current fact cannot, and knowing which is which is worth more than knowing how long any of them take.