How do you manage working in different time zones?

We’ve got many guests in our coliving space (www.sun-and-co.com) in Spain who work Pacific times. It doesn’t seem to be a problem. Most of them it’s true that arrange all of their meetings in one or two days and then, they can work the rest of the week in the morning.

If you go to Asia that will make it a little bit more complicated since you’d be working during the night.

There is an interesting Chrome app I often use: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/my-time-zone-automatic-ti/fdmjemdmpmohggbjhmbeoipmheemmcpm

Early mornings and late nights as needed (hopefully not on the same day). This is the main tradeoff you make as a nomad, but the overall freedom is more than worth it to me. Also https://www.worldtimebuddy.com

As many before me emphasised, transparency is the key. If there are important live calls/chats that you need to attend – adjust to it and try to minimise the amount of it. Everything else can be done asynchronously with automation and proper documentation. Being open, keeping great communication and preparing things ahead is in my opinion more important for customers than being in the same time zone.

I’ve contracted with remote workers for years. I look for a 4 hour window each business day when they are working on a team. And when they are working Solo, I want a 2 hour window for contact during my business day. And when I’m the contractor, I do the same. Source of funds should be least inconvenienced when you are working in different time zones. I never cared what the work hours were, just that we had them agreed ahead of time.

I have my own business that deals mostly with clients in the States and I am in SE Asia. The biggest thing for me has been the importance of scheduling.

2 tools that have helped me immeasurably: Acquity scheduling (HUGE Difference maker on a lot of different levels for me) and an add on called “Hour” for my mac.

Other than that - it’s just like has been said. I just had to find a rhythm and make the initial adjustment. Traveling from place to place complicates things so I try and schedule in longer periods (7-10 days) every few weeks in one location with solid amenities to set as a base to re-charge and get really intensive work done. And yep - I had to start turning the phone off and only accepting scheduled calls.

Laying out expectations really help. I’m a web dev freelancer from California. I’ve been in Europe for the last 3 months. M work is more projects/results based and my clients know to allow 24 hours for me to respond. It’s irrelevant for me to be available online when they are. I was worried about it at first too, but as long as you stay in communication, no one knows or cares where you are (at least for me), they care about their tasks being done in general. In fact, being 9 hours ahead of CA has worked out better than I expected. I have most of the day to work without clients emailing me or other distractions, my Monday work is done before their Monday starts, and again, if they email me with something at 4pm their time, well, I will get to it the next day before they wake up. I also am not available via phone, it is really disruptive for me to be interrupted, so I don’t accept random phone calls.

I work in Argentina, 5 hours ahead of my office in California, and what I’ve ended up doing is by default working from 2-10 such that my hours align with the rest of my teams, but if I know some event is going on during the week I’ll work from, say, 11-7 instead. I have a data plan set up such that I always can be in contact with my team if I’m outside of wifi and something goes wrong, so it gives me more flexibility in changing my hours (as long as I can get to a computer within 1-2 hours), but so far there haven’t been any problems with this approach.

I’m much more of a morning person so I actually like the inverted work day where I have my free time in the mornings and not much free time after work. It feels good to know once I sit down for work (assuming I’m starting at 2) that this is the last thing I’m going to do for the day before eating dinner and then falling asleep.
Any other folks here who think they’d like this arrangement should definitely give it a try.

Personally I have three homes one in Zurich, one in Argentina and another in Florida and I spend various parts of the year in each.

Of course a lot comes down to where you are dealing with. In my case I have to liaise with the office here in Switzerland and that can be quite difficult. Normally what I do is allocate several hours to ensure there is an overlap. For example when I visit Australia I have to work early in the morning and again in the evening.

A lot will depend how sensitive the work is time-wise but there are numerous ways you can feel things in one potential solution is a virtual personal assistant. The other thing is to try to automate as much of the business as possible.

Frankly there is no perfect solution and I’ve been looking for it for years and have not found it but there are lots of ways you can make it a lot easier. One suggestion is you could tell your clients you’re on eastern Time as opposed to Pacific that would make things three hours easier if you are Europe. This would be easy to achieve with a telephone number somewhere on the East Coast and it would be acceptable to most people in the US because I know from experience when I’m at my house that we never have any problems with that time difference.

Totally agree with @grum - it is part of your job as a remote worker to be realistic with your hours and set reasonable expectations up front. Don’t feel like you are cheating your client/boss by setting different hours than they work - work with them to come up with something that works for both of you and then sell it as a win-win.

I spent 2 months traveling around Europe and Central Asia (I know, not super long) and my clients were Pacific Time: 7 - 14 hour difference depending on where I was. I ended up working in the early morning (6-8 AM to 10 AM - Noon) for one client and late night (6 - 8 PM to 10 PM - Midnight) for the other while spending the mid-time exploring. Even hiked part of Cinque Terre’s sendero azul on a work day

Important keys for me were:

• Made a realistic, semi-routine schedule with built-in flexibility
• Made sure my availability was clear and completely transparent
• Lots of communication in their preferred medium (slack)
• Checked in once every or every other week with how the arrangement was going and if we needed to make changes
• Take a nap if you are sleeping less total hours at night. Seriously, the burn out is real

I’ve done this before in Europe with colleagues that work Central time (+0600). I ended up working 2pm to 10pm, where my dinner break mostly lined up with their lunch, and European culture dictated staying out much later in the summer (e.g. dinner at 11pm - midnight).

This worked out well, except if I wanted to do touristy things that were only open in the morning, because I couldn’t always get up quite that early going to bed at 2am or later. It wasn’t realistic to try to sleep right at 10pm either, as I was too wound up from work and needed the time to relax before crashing.

Good luck!

If you choose to take on remote work, you take on the responsibilities associated with it - i.e. not letting expectations on availability be ambiguous to others.

Sit down with clients/the boss and define a realistic availability timeframe. If they aren’t willing to be flexible, you need to re-think your travel plans.

In the end if you start forcing unrealistic working hours, you’re going to burn out and lose the freedom you’ve given yourself. This is a common problem for people in this community. Those who fight time will lose in the long run.