About this site
Fifty notes on working across time zones with people who are not in your organisation: clients, suppliers, contractors, forwarders, inspectors and anybody else who never agreed to your working conventions and cannot be asked to.
What it covers
Which days the other party actually works, and the holidays and closures that empty their office without appearing on any list you can look up. What a stated deadline turns out to mean once it has crossed a border. What it costs to wait on somebody, and what it costs to be the person being waited on, which is the half nobody measures. The hour, if there is one, in which everybody is awake. And what to ask before signing, so that none of it is discovered in the third month.
The argument running through it
You can change your own working week and nobody else's. Almost every piece of advice written about distributed work assumes the first — adopt a core overlap, agree a convention, rotate the inconvenient call — and all of it assumes an organisation that can issue an instruction and have it followed.
With a client, a supplier or an inspector none of that is available. What is left is narrower and more durable: find out their week, write it down where the next person will look, state your own dates as instants, and build the difference into what you agree rather than into somebody's evening.
What it is not
It is not about your own distributed team. That is a different problem with a large and useful literature of its own, and very little of it transfers to a party you are not able to instruct.
It is not a guide to any particular trade. The examples are drawn from manufacturing and freight because that is where the record came from, and the structure is the same for an agency, a law firm or a software team with vendors.
It is not advice about any particular counterparty. Every figure used here is an illustration of what one organisation recorded about its own work over about eighteen months, labelled as such on the page where it appears. No benchmark is offered and none is implied.
It is also not legal or contractual advice. What a delivery date means, when a notice period begins, what counts as a working day and which holidays suspend a deadline all differ by jurisdiction and by contract, and they change. Those are questions for somebody qualified in the place concerned.