Across Time Zones
17 articles on across time zones.
What Is the Follow the Sun Model, and Why It Strains Small Teams
Work passes between zones so it continues without night shifts. It lives or dies on the handoff, and small teams rarely have the redundancy it needs.
Rotating Meeting Times Is Fair. Having Fewer Meetings Is Better.
A rotation spreads the cost of a bad slot without reducing it. Classify each meeting, rotate only what needs live time, and write the rest down.
Working With Overseas Suppliers When the Factory Day Is Already Over
A question sent at 17:00 lands after the factory day is over. Send in your morning, ask closed questions with a default, and keep one record per order.
Managing a Team Across Time Zones: Design the Work Around the Waiting
A bigger gap means less real time exchange. Manage the waiting instead: named owners, a written daily handoff, decisions with a home, answers without a person.
What a Time Zone Difference Actually Costs a Team
The research finding is narrow: a bigger gap means less real time exchange. The cost shows up as round trips. Here is a Tuesday between Tokyo and Amsterdam.
Time Zone Overlap for Remote Teams: A Worked Table of City Pairs
Real overlap for common city pairs on a 09:00 to 17:00 day. Amsterdam and New York gives two hours. Here is what to do when it is under two.
Working-Hours Agreements for Distributed Teams That Hold Up
Flexible hours without a written agreement becomes always available. Four parts make one hold, and most agreements are missing the fourth.
Why Handoffs Fail Across Time Zones, and the Four Fields That Fix Them
Handoffs fail because they report activity, omit unknowns, name nobody, and get buried. Four fields fix all four: state, open questions, blockers, next actions.
Coverage Across Time Zones Without Turning Everyone Into On-Call
Coverage answers questions; on-call handles outages. Merging them creates one senior engineer who never logs off.
A Communication Plan for a Team in Three Countries (Template)
One page: which channel, how fast, who decides, and where to look before you ask a person. A communication plan template for distributed teams.
Managing an Offshore Engineering Team You Cannot Be Online With
Offshore teams rarely fail on capability. They fail on the round trip: a question asked at 10:00 their time answered a day later.
Rotating Meetings Across Time Zones Treats the Symptom
Rotation spreads an unkind meeting hour evenly instead of removing it. Most rotated meetings are status meetings.
US and European Teams: Keeping Their Morning From Becoming Your Evening
The Europe to US overlap lands at the end of the European day, so their morning becomes your evening.
Working With a Team in Asia From Europe: What Actually Breaks
Europe and Asia share about two hours. What breaks is the question asked at the start of the Asian day that cannot be answered until Europe wakes up.
Follow-the-Sun Without the 24-Hour Availability Expectation
Follow-the-sun moves work between zones. Most implementations drift into keeping people reachable in all of them.
How Much Overlap Does a Distributed Team Actually Need?
Most distributed teams need two to three hours of overlap per seam per week, not per day. Here is what overlap is genuinely for.
Managing a Team Across Three Time Zones Without Anyone Working Two Shifts
Three time zones has no shared hour, so the manager becomes the relay. Sort the cross-seam traffic into status, decisions, and escalations.
Your team’s week, answered from the work.
If this is your team’s week, see what a StandIn does with it.