Three shared days

On paper a team split between the Gulf and a head office on the Monday to Friday week has four working days together. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Sunday belongs to one side, Friday to the other, and the middle four are shared.

In practice it is three.

Thursday here is the last day before the weekend, so it fills with whatever has to be closed out and empties by mid-afternoon. Then subtract the time zone. A head office two or three hours behind means the morning at one end is nobody at the other, and the window where both sides are at a desk and awake is a few hours wide. Anything that needs two people in one conversation, a decision, an approval, a disagreement worth having, happens between Monday and Wednesday.

The rest of the week is handover notes. I have only ever worked on the side of that split that writes them.

That gets presented as a scheduling problem, usually with a shared calendar and a set of colours. It is not one. It is a decision about which side of the team is allowed to work in real time and which side has to work by note, and the two are not equal. Working by note is slower, and weaker as well. The person writing the note has to guess the question in advance. The person reading it can leave it until Monday and lose nothing.

Nobody makes that decision out loud. It arrives by default, and the default goes to whichever side the head office is on. Their five days are the week. The other side gets three days of work, one day of closing out, and one day of writing things down for people who are not there.

It is the most consequential decision in a distributed team, and it is the only one nobody remembers taking.