A cut goes out on Tuesday and the client answers the following Monday. In most studios those six days come straight out of the time left to fix whatever they ask for, even though none of them were yours.
RecReview stops the internal clock while the ball is with the client. Set a client-category blocker and the badge reads Deadline paused; clear it and the clock resumes. The days spent waiting are added back to your internal deadline, so the buffer you sized is the buffer you get.
What moves and what never does
| While the client has it | |
|---|---|
| Internal deadline | Pauses, then resumes where it left off |
| Due (the client’s date) | Never moves |
| Days left on your side | Frozen |
That second row is deliberate. Time spent in client review buys your team internal slack; it does not buy the client a later delivery. If the promise genuinely has to move, you move it in a conversation, rather than letting it drift because they were slow.
The clock also never gives you more time than the promise. However long a review drags on, the internal deadline stops at the due date.
The two habits that keep it honest
The pause is driven by the blocker, so it is only as accurate as your blockers are.
Set the client blocker the moment work goes out, not the moment you remember. Send to client does it for you, which is the main reason to deliver from inside RecReview instead of from your inbox.
Clear it the moment the answer lands. An approval or a change request through the portal clears it for you, but a client who answers by phone does not, so clear it by hand. A blocker left on for three days after the client already replied looks exactly like a slow client, both to you and to every projection built on that history.
It runs on rules you can see
Pausing and resuming are ordinary automations that arrive with every preset — one fires when a client blocker is added, the other when it is removed. They sit in Workspace Settings → Automations and you can switch them off if you would rather the clock never stopped. Rebuilding them by hand is not an option, since the editor’s action list doesn’t offer the deadline-clock actions.
Warning: If you turn the pause rule off, turn the resume rule off with it. A task that pauses and never resumes keeps freezing its internal deadline for as long as the blocker stands.
What’s next
Read the projection before you promise. The same waiting history is what lets RecReview predict the next one.