Ask HN: People who work different timezones than your company. How sched?
What's your schedule like?
How do you motivate yourself to work?
Is caffeine/sleep/food an issue?
How do you motivate yourself to work?
Is caffeine/sleep/food an issue?
Long story short, really weird times. Even though most of the communications were async, I still started really early and then called it at midday because I didn´t have more battery on me. I followed up on things by mobile chat in the afternoon but I was already checked out mentally by 2pm. Sometimes when I felt rested enough I gave it a little more in the nights and coordinated with early birds from Europe before I hit the bed.
This went on for over 2 years easily. I gotta say I completely burned out and it took me a long time to recover.
For the ones asking why?. The business outsourced some services overseas which became part of the critical path.
For a while I worked on a 1pm-9pm schedule which gave me a decent overlap with the "let's have a quick call" folks. Having the whole morning to myself was nice.
Append-only logs
Instead of chat threads that scroll away, we keep a single plain-text “journal” per project. Every update gets appended with a timestamp and author tag. No editing, no missed messages—people just read from the top and see everything in context.
Per-task semantic headers
We prefix each log entry with a short header like TASK-123: or MEETING-UX: so you can grep for specific topics later. It’s saved us hours hunting through free-form notes.
Hope that helps! I’m onestardao—feel free to ping me with any follow-ups.
Schedule wise, I do some regular evening hours (2 / week) to catchup - that can be a real problem sleep wise. If you finish your calls late in the evening, especially the ones where you are the one doing the talking and presenting things, it's very hard to go to sleep straight after that. You need to add at least 1h of winding down time.
As for motivation, from my experience, when I'm working on something I really like, I'm 10x more efficient that I would be in the office. When you start in the morning, you know that for a long period there will be nobody to interrupt you and you get a LOT more done.
The opposite is similar though - when I'm not motivated by a project, it's insanely hard to motivate myself. But maybe it's a sign that the project shouldn't be done in the first place.
I was in the UK, a colleague was in Eire and everyone else the US. The colleague was (still is) a coder, I did user support. Communication was IRC. The effect for me was that I'd do my full day then stay online as the US folks started theirs. 15+hr days became the norm (I moved into tackling spam as well as user help) and on more than one occasion I'd just work through the night. ENTIRELY up to me, zero pressure, not even implied. I just like to stay on top of things.
Motivation? I was hired to do a job, so I did it.
At the time I imbibed a lot of caffeine but that was as much as addiction as anything else. Kicked that habit before I left.
It took some years but teams were eventually set by timezone +/- a few hours which was good.
On the bright side I could sleep as much as I wanted in the morning and do chores in first half of the day.
What helped me with motivation is Daily Standup with my team where you have to report about your L24 progress and what you're going to be N24. This added enough stress to increase my motivation to do stuff. I couldn't show up with nothing or lie my way out of it. Also US comp was pretty big motivator. Geo arbitrage etc.
Wake up 4:45am, start work 5am (9am or 10am central). Make a bagel or something easy. Get drinks as needed. Get a snack before standup at 1pm central if needed. Get off at 1pm (5pm or 6pm central). Make lunch at that time. Eat dinner about 5-6pm. Head to bed at 7:30pm to 8pm.
I don't take a lunch. And if I do, I'll just work later or start earlier the next day.
I have to get on meetings at 4am sometimes when we do a deployment or have meetings with people who are more important than me. I've had to be on a 3am equivalent meeting once in the past 4 years. Small price to pay for the privilege of living in Hawaii.
It disrupted my sleep cycle, which was tougher than I expected. I'm always up late, but working late is different. The project was exciting, so motivation wasn't an issue.
I'd do it again, for the right project. But I personally wouldn't want to do anything more synchronous than an hour a day.
Worked great for me, I'm a little bit to the east of CET. My mornings, my most productive hours, were typically unmolested. Then chill out into meetings in the afternoon.
My boss was in Toronto, had to work a bit late to do calls with him, but usually had a long lunch or big dog walk on those days.
His day was typically meetings in the morning, work in the afternoon. The opposite of mine.
I pitied the Australians. They seemed to be attending calls at brutally antisocial hours.
That worked out very nicely. We developed during the day, sent out a mail with test instructions, went home, and had a mail message with test results in the morning. So, it felt like you never had to wait for test results.
9 hours also isn’t too large a difference for the occasional phone meeting (one side would take the call from home, either before coming to work, or after getting home, and would take compensation time typically on the same day).
It does require people in both teams who can write clearly, though.
The main issue is always the regular meetings, the standups. Most people prefer to wake up at 10. Some at 11 lol. So you can move standups around "lunch" safely enough. Some people hate standups at the end of the day (i.e. me) because it tends to overlap with the inconsistent end of day school schedules and traffic jams.
But do consider if you actually need standups. Everything should be on Jira. Whenever you commit a file, it can be on Jira too. Scrum was invented before all these tools, back when people had individual offices. Continuous Flow is a valid option and agile.
Other key meetings are what to do (grooming), what have we done (demo), and what can we do better (retro). You don't actually need to follow any sprint format. A clean format is meetings on Monday and Friday, but with new teams and startups, you might want one every 2 days.
If you can do async, do so. Lots of people prefer text too. Text is slower, mainly an issue for managers who need to talk to lots of people. But it lets people think more clearly and supply links as necessary.
Motivation itself isn't that much different than other remote jobs. Make sure it's something you're interested in working on, try to make a few close work buddies, and go enjoy life when the time you said you were going to clock out comes.
Some days I just don't work, and I learned to give myself the day (rarely two) but get back to work with a strong day the following day to regain my momentum. I find momentum is key in working remotely, you have to maintain a steady pace and not go too hard or too easy or else you're going to burn out or develop bad habits.
I tend to work whatever days are necessary, weekend or whatever. My life is very flexible, so sometimes I'll have a mid-week weekend and work the weekend instead.
tl;dr: momentum is key, try and work at least a few hours a day and ensure you maintain a steady pace over time without doing death-marches or being lazy.
Something I've learned with eating + time zones is "find out when people actually eat, not what time you'd be eating if your clock was changed too". Apart from cultural differences you easily conclude lunch is "sometime between 11:00 and 2:00" just by surveying ones neighbors. Add in a few hour time difference and suddenly it's impossible to schedule a meeting unless you guess, learn, or see it on their calendar when scheduling.