A timetable with a space for lunch

Text: an original contemporary workplace-column-style practice extract.

The old rota listed five visits in an afternoon and left lunch to happen somewhere between them. On paper, no visit had lost a minute. In practice, lunch became a sandwich eaten while reading directions, or a promise to stop after the next address. The gap existed only if nothing else took longer than planned.

The revised rota showed a lunch interval. Someone called it less ambitious because one afternoon could now hold fewer visits. Yet the visits that remained stopped depending on an unrecorded favour from the worker’s time. We could see when an urgent addition required changing another appointment, instead of pretending it would fit into a blank part of the day.

The revision did not prevent every late visit. Traffic and unanswered doors continued to trouble the schedule. It made one limit honest. A plan should tell us what can be arranged under its conditions, not merely display how much work would fit if a person had no conditions of their own.

In this extract, the writer tries to show that making a limit visible can improve an arrangement.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.