Asking
Asking Across a Time Zone
When your colleagues are hours ahead, the hour you press send decides whether the answer comes back today or tomorrow, and the hour is entirely yours to choose.
What the people on this page had to find out, and where from
How to get a staging database password
you asked2The answer was one sentence and had no owner
Why the retry limit is three and not five
you asked9The reason existed and was in one person's head
two things you had to know · nobody told you any of them · the median arrived in week 9 · all two you went and got
Two answers that existed only in somebody's head. The second sat in the question list for a month before it was asked.
For remote onboarding, remote onboarding productivity tools adds a practical reference for time, activity, projects, and reports when the team reviews early progress.
The wider workplace question can also be checked against resources from LinkedIn.
Five questions sent to a team six hours ahead, and what the sending hour cost
Sent at 16:00, when it occurred to you
18 hanswer: 4 minYou waited because their working day had ended two hours earlier. The answer was waiting the following morning, which was a day later than it needed to be
Sent at 09:00 the next day, having learned
2 hanswer: 4 minYou waited because you waited for their morning rather than your afternoon. Answered inside the hour
Sent at 17:30 on a Friday
66 hanswer: 6 minYou waited because you wanted the week off your desk. Read on their Monday morning, which was most of three days
Sent at 08:30 with everything attached
1 hanswer: 12 minYou waited because you asked properly the first time. Answered before your own morning meeting
Sent at 14:00 with a guess attached
3 hanswer: 2 minYou waited because you asked in the afternoon but made the answer one word. Answered at the very end of their day
five occasions · 90 hours spent stuck · 28 minutes of answers · the longest single wait was 66 hours
Ninety hours of waiting across five questions, and eighty-four of them belong to two messages sent at the wrong hour. The questions were the same questions. One person's own first quarter.
If the people who can answer you are several hours ahead, the hour at which you send decides whether you wait two hours or twenty.
This is arithmetic rather than anybody's fault, and it is the one part of the problem that is completely within your control.
The shape of it
A colleague six hours ahead finishes their day at about two in the afternoon, your time. Everything you send after that waits until their tomorrow.
It occurs to you to ask at four, because four in the afternoon is when the day's loose ends get tidied. So the question goes at four and the answer comes the following morning.
Sent at half past eight the same day, the identical question is answered before your own morning meeting.
What to do about it
Keep a list and send it early. Questions occur all day. They do not have to be sent all day. Write them down and clear the list first thing in your morning, which is the middle of theirs.
Ask more at once. Across an offset, one message with four questions costs one wait. Four messages across the day cost four.
Put more in the question. Context, what you tried, and your guess matter more here than anywhere, because a question that produces a follow-up has cost you a second day rather than a second minute.
Say what you will do if you hear nothing. The highest-value sentence available across a time difference:
If I do not hear back by the end of your day I will go ahead with the second option and we can change it tomorrow if that was wrong.
That converts a blocking question into a non-blocking one, and it is received as competence rather than as impatience.
The Friday problem
A question sent at half past five on a Friday to somebody ahead of you is read on their Monday. If their weekend is also not your weekend, it can be longer.
Of the ninety hours in the panel above, sixty-six belong to one Friday evening message. The habit that caused it — clearing the desk before the weekend — is a good habit in every other respect.
The fix is a rule rather than a judgement: anything going to a team ahead of you leaves before noon on Friday or waits until Monday morning, when it will be read the same day.
What not to do
Do not start working their hours. A new person who begins answering at seven in the morning to overlap with a distant team establishes an expectation in week three that they will still be meeting in year two, and nobody will ever ask them to stop.
Do not treat the delay as evidence of anything. A question sent at four and answered at nine the next morning was answered promptly. It is very easy, in a first month, to read an overnight silence as being ignored.
The one thing to ask for
If the overlap is small and you are new, ask your manager for a short regular slot inside it.
Could we do fifteen minutes at nine my time on Mondays and Wednesdays? Most of what I get stuck on is quicker to say than to write, and that is the only window we share.
Fifteen minutes twice a week inside a narrow overlap is worth more than any amount of written correspondence, and asking for it in week two is ordinary. Asking for it in month four, when it has become apparent that you are slower than expected, is a different conversation.
Writing for somebody reading at the start of their day
A question that arrives overnight is read cold, by somebody with no memory of the conversation, usually before coffee.
Three habits make it answerable in that state.
- Repeat the context rather than referring to it. "Following on from yesterday" costs the reader a search.
- Put the question in the first line, not after the background.
- Say what happens if they do not answer, so a reply is optional.
The second is the one most often got wrong. A message that opens with three sentences of explanation and asks its question at the end is read by somebody scanning, who stops after the first sentence and comes back to it later, which is the next day.
None of this is special to time zones. It simply matters more when the cost of being unclear is twenty-four hours rather than four minutes.
Batching without hoarding
Collecting questions to send in one message is right, and it has a limit.
A question that blocks you should go immediately regardless of the hour, because a day of being blocked costs more than the round trip saved.
Everything else can wait for the morning send. The test is the one used throughout this collection: is anybody, including you, unable to work until this is answered? If not, it joins the list.
Most first-month questions are not blocking. Two or three a week are, and those are the ones worth breaking the batch for.