As a department manager, if I hit a bottleneck of waiting for people to get back to me, I could always easily find something to do - config files to clean up, tickets to update, customers to check up on, documentation to update, that kind of thing. As a PM, a lot of what I do is wait, and re-adjust my schedules accordingly. I have 7 people who should get back to me, but only one more spare task left I can do without their input. And this is despite having four projects to do. The calendar suggests there is no point nagging until tomorrow so I'm alternately reading some standards and expanding my german vocab randomly, saving my outstanding task (dividing up more work items and refining the deliverables) for the morning. Not feeling productive depresses me.

Standards are funny things (non-tech ones). You take a problem or requirement and come up with some common sense answers. You then take this common sense, spread it among so many parties it gets worn thin and shredded, and then encrypt it via committee. You then package it in an expensive cover and charge 100s of dollars for the raw material, and 1000s for the training, the end result of which is a list of ticky boxes, which unless you're implementing the ticky boxes because of a ticky box requirement, you have to decrypt and patch back together the original germ of common sense in order to address your situation. It is a way of making a living that would be incomprehensible to our caveman ancestors. OTOH, indoor plumbing good.