[Founder’s Real Talk #18] Dealing with time zones in distributed work

One of the biggest challenges of distributed work is the time difference. You can try your best to balance sync and async communications with Slack and email replacing meetings, but the time zones are impossible to change — as long as we live on the earth.

As a fully distributed company, our situation is tricky. My head of bizops sits in Argentina, and my financial analyst lives in India, not to mention my cofounders on the east coast and some of my other teammates in other parts of Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Over the past months, I’ve also personally made things worse, but going on trips (previously planned) to Tahiti, Switzerland, Italy, and more recently, last week in Hawaii.

To me, dealing with time zones is a feature, not a bug, for distributed work. If you are still thinking about the framework of synchronous office work, then this is absolutely a headache. But for living in 2022, this is definitely doable.

First of all, communication is key. Make sure the people you are working closely with know where you are and can expect when you can be reached. You can think of this as when you can online / offline, but honestly, with Slack, Notion, email, Google Docs, and everything on my phone, I don’t really have a clear sense of when I’m online / offline. Remember back in high school, during the breaks I’d spend hours each day chatting with my friends on MSN Messenger. It was done on a laptop, and people used to have the sense of online/offline. But now with smart phones, I’m basically 24/7 online — well, unless I’m sleeping — but my sleeping schedule is also probably not a typical one, so I can respond to messages when it’s mid night or 1am my time. Bottome line is, the boundary of work time is blurred now, but it’s still helpful for people to understand which time zone you are in.

Second, give people heads-up on milestones and potential blockers. Whether it’s for a client project or an internal project, make sure the project plan is visible to everyone so that people can see what’s coming. Everyone should try to avoid the situation where someone is a blocker and then that person becomes unreachable. As long as everyone does their fair part of moving the project forward, it shouldn’t matter if that person does it at 8am their time or 8pm their time. You can choose to have a project manager to make sure everyone follows the progress schedule, or everyone can set up reminders in Notion / Jira / Asana etc. to make sure deadlines are met. We are all professional knowledge workers and should work under the trust system that everyone will do their own part to make the team work as a whole.

Third, try your best to document all the knowledge and workflows. Not everyone is super clear on how to do certain things and where to find certain resources, so make sure the knowledge base documentation is as comprehensive and updated as possible. Not everyone is used to this self-sufficient way of looking up documentation and finding their own answers, but this is indeed the key of async distributed work — you can’t expect to always “knock on someone’s shoulder” on Slack, because you might be interrupting that person’s focus work or personal time, also, that person might be telling you the outdated info (and that’s fairly common in distributed work with a large organization). So, the source of truth should always come from a well-maintained documentation center for knowledge base and workflows.

Fourth, be super clear in communicating your organization and team’s priorities. People have the tendency to go too deep into non-priority stuff, because they may feel insecure about certain details. However, it’s very easy to end up taking too much time in sync meetings and messaging that it’s distracting you from the top priority stuff and burning out your time and energy. So, the best way to respect your own time and others’ time is to prioritize and thus be efficient in your communications. That way, you leave more time for your own focus work, and make others more efficient in their focus work too.

It takes time to build your muscle memory on this way of working, and may take more time for your team to get used to this. But it’s very helpful for your organization’s total throughput and make sure no one is burned out from the work. That’s how I found inner peace from working in Tahiti, Switzerland, Italy, Hawaii, and maybe in a few months back home in China. And I hope everyone can find inner peace from distributed work too!

Happy New Year!