SCHEDULING MEETINGS ACROSS TIME ZONES UPDATE

To address this I would ask my colleagues to leave a Slack update at the end of their day summarising what progress they had made and what still needed to be done. Unlike regular working scenarios, when working across timezones you will not be able to sync up first thing in the morning to figure out what to work on next. It is important to make a plan with your team for the evening / next morning before you finish your crossover hours for the day.

This simple change gave us 5 hours of overlap rather than 4 which is an increase of 25%. To maximise our productive time together, I shifted my lunch an hour earlier. In my case, I typically take lunch from 12 noon until 2pm but my US based colleagues come online at 1pm. This is probably an obvious one but when you are working with a relatively short window where both you and your colleagues are online, it is important to make sure you are available for all of those hours (or as many as possible). However, I found the following tips helped a lot. I typically start work at 8am and I work until 6pm with a two hour lunch break at 12 noon (I like to take a long lunch to get some exercise in and to break up the day).įor about a month though I was working with folks based in UTC -4 which meant I came online about 5 hours before my colleagues.

I recently had this experience for the first time and learned some tips that I wanted to share.įor context, I work in a UTC +1 timezone in Europe. If you have ever spent time working with teammates in a very different timezone, you will likely know the struggle of coping with timezone lags.

Scheduling meetings across time zones