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Comment by policepost | Hacker News Reader

Don't connect your phone to work. Close your laptop at 5. Walk away.

Keep to a standard schedule.

Seeing the amount of people that answer late night chats from people in other timezones upsets me. What upsets me more are the people on vacation answering chats as soon as they’re pinged. That behavior changes work culture and expectations the more it happens. Bad managers love this sort of thing. I learned a long time ago that to keep my sanity I need a wall up between work hours and my personal life.

Its not always that easy. Enterprise just doesn't work that way. Where multiple timezones come in to play you need to be around.

If I need email comms for an important document regarding to something super tight. I can't just wait till tomorrow.

Information can be crucial at times and emails can cause break down in communications.

Spreadsheets need to be spread and PowerPoints need to be pointed.

Work yes, you can step back from, communication you can't just shut off.

Sure but this is why I don’t work in that field and neither do these people.

Is there anyone on your team that just isn't around? Keeps a strict schedule - I've found that even working across time zones with tight deadlines, some people just have a hard stop.

Its not the matter of my team.

Its more talking to the VPs of other department's.

Counterpoint, I work in an international company where teams in Europe often need to liaise with teams in the US. The policy is: if it needs to wait, it waits. If it can't wait, you need to reorganize your teams' responsibilities so that those who are reliant on each other are timezone-aligned.

> If it can't wait, you need to reorganize your teams' responsibilities so that those who are reliant on each other are timezone-aligned.

I'm not a developer nor a manager. The team responsibilities; we are one of the most efficient. Our teams cross over the globe: Hong Kong, China, Japan, America's,

My manager is spot on. The team are fine, it's just the nature of work.

If it's that important and you've left it until the night before, you have failed to do your own job properly through inadequate prior planning.

Having managed teams in Asia from the US, let me provide the alternate view.

You are in Asia and it's 10am HKT/10pm ET. You are facing a problem/issue that you are 90% sure someone in the US knows the answer to.

You are faced with: - being blocked all day till US business hours

- trial and erroring your way through the problem

My view as the manager was always "I trust you to send me a message up till 10:30pm if you need something and I will respond. Don't abuse that but I'd rather be contacted late once in a while vs you being blocked all day."

That sounds like the company really hasn’t set up their teams for success. There are a lot of assumptions here that it’s on the individual contributors to solve these issues at a high cost to their personal lives.

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