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If you are not into scheduling your Slack messages to send later, try to open your message with “Future followed by your message. You can also schedule messages to send on other communication tools like Slack. This will prevent their phone getting pings when they are supposed to be disconnected. If your primary method of communicating is by email, it can be helpful to schedule your emails to send to your colleagues at a time when you know they will be online. The tone of written communications (like emails) is hard to detect and can make some things seem more urgent than they really are. It is often easy to misconstrue urgency in written messages that arrive outside one’s normal working hours. If you want to be more mindful of other peoples’ hours, try to use less urgent methods of communication. Some of your colleagues will probably set cutoff times for themselves too, so try to be empathetic and don’t expect responses from people outside their regular working hours. If you are setting a clear cutoff point, it is important to communicate it clearly with your team so that they know that communication with you outside these set hours will need to be async.īoundaries are a two way street. I would address anything that landed in my inbox after that time the following morning. I would recommend instigating a firm cutoff point in the evening when you will down tools for the day. While it is good to be accommodating (like moving your lunch time around), you should not be too flexible to appease others’ schedules.

Set clear boundaries for your work hours.

#SCHEDULE MEETING ACROSS TIME ZONES OFFLINE#

Finally, I would clearly state how far I had got with my work before going offline again at 6pm UTC +1. We would all sync together when they came online at 1pm UTC +1. That way I could pick stuff up the next morning while they were still sleeping.

#SCHEDULE MEETING 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.

Schedule meeting across time zones