The overlap hour

A team spread across three time zones does most of its real work in about two hours a day.

The window opens when the westernmost person logs on and closes when the easternmost person leaves. Everything that needs two people awake at once is squeezed into it: the approvals, the questions, the quick call to sort out what the message meant.

Every regional team I have worked in has run like this, and for most of the year it works. The window is narrow but reliable, and people learn to save things up for it.

Then July.

Leave stacks across countries. The Gulf goes in July, Europe goes in August, and Egypt goes to the coast on a Thursday and comes back on a Sunday. On any given day one of the three zones is missing the person who decides, and the window closes entirely for a week at a time. Nobody is away for long. Everyone is away at a different time.

Some teams stop. Not loudly. Work sits in a message waiting for a reply from a beach, then for a reply to the reply. Three days pass, nothing is wrong, and nothing has moved.

Other teams keep going and barely notice. Nothing special happened in July. Months earlier they had stopped needing the window. Every decision travelled with its reasoning attached, so the next person could act on it without asking. Every piece of work was left in a state somebody could pick up cold. Nobody waited for a call to find out what a message meant, because the message said what it meant.

The smallest viable version of a distributed team is one that can lose the window for a week and not notice. Most teams cannot, because they were never distributed. They were co-located across a bad connection, and July is the month the connection drops.