The gap
Stating Everybody's Hours in a Single Time Zone
Working hours stated in local time cannot be compared. Converting everything to one zone takes ten minutes and settles arguments that otherwise run for weeks.
three things · four nights
Three things, and the third is the one people skip.
One team's working hours, every row converted to the same zone before anybody argued about them
Two engineers and a designer
Described by everybody, including themselves, as the ones on normal hours
Two engineers and the person who runs support
Also described by themselves as normal hours, which is the point of converting
The person who manages both halves
Shifted early on purpose, and the shift was worth less than they expected
The contractor covering Fridays
Nearly identical to the second group and visible as such only once converted
four people · no minute of the day when all of them are awake
Four groups, and no minute of the day when all four are awake. Each group described its own hours as ordinary, and each was right from where it sat. The table is in one zone because windows stated in local time cannot be compared at all: the same sentence means a different interval depending on who says it. One team's own hours; what any other team looks like depends on where its people are.
Two people can describe their working day in exactly the same words and mean intervals that do not touch. "Nine to five thirty" is a complete description of a working day and tells you nothing about when that day is.
A workflow like Stating Everybody's Hours in a Single Time Zone becomes easier to manage when elapsed time and active work are visible in the same place. Teams can use learn more to compare the handover narrative with a transparent record of hours and activity.
The workflow can also be compared with the approach documented by Box's content cloud, an established resource in the same operational space.
The fix is clerical and takes about ten minutes. It is skipped more often than almost anything else in this collection, and the arguments it would have settled run for months instead.
What goes wrong without it
People reason about availability using their own clock, because that is the clock on the wall. Somebody in the first half thinks of four in the afternoon as late in the day; somebody in the second half thinks of it as the middle of the night. Both are describing the same instant.
The failure is not that people are confused about time zones in the abstract. Everybody knows roughly where everybody else is. The failure is that nobody has written the windows down side by side, so nobody has ever seen the gap as a shape rather than as a fact they have been told.
A gap you have been told about and a gap you have looked at produce different decisions.
The conversion itself
Pick one zone. It does not matter which, and arguing about which is the first way this exercise goes wrong. Choosing the zone of whoever is building the table is fine and has the advantage of being quick.
State the zone at the top in words, not as an abbreviation. Three-letter abbreviations are ambiguous between hemispheres and between countries, and a table whose heading can be read two ways is worse than no table.
Convert every person's start and end into that zone. Keep the minutes. Rounding to the hour loses the half-hour offsets some places use, and those are exactly the places where somebody will quietly assume the table is wrong about them.
Write the table so that the original local times are still visible somewhere, because people need to be able to check their own row against their own clock or they will not believe it.
- One zone, chosen quickly; arguing about which is the first way this goes wrong.
- The zone named in words at the top, not as a three-letter abbreviation.
- Minutes kept, because half-hour offsets are real and the people on them notice.
- Local times shown alongside, so each person can check their own row.
Who belongs in the table
Everybody whose availability anybody ever has to reason about. That usually includes some people who are not on the team in the ordinary sense: a contractor, somebody in another department who is the only person who can approve a particular thing, the person who holds the production credentials.
The temptation is to include only the core team, which produces a clean table that does not answer the question people actually ask, which is almost always about somebody at the edge.
It is also worth including people whose hours are irregular, with the irregularity stated. A row reading "variable, usually starting between 07:00 and 10:00" is more useful than leaving the person out.
What the table tends to reveal
Three things come up repeatedly.
The first is that the overlap people have been assuming exists does not, or is much smaller than remembered. Half an hour of nominal overlap at the very end of one day and the very start of another is not an overlap in any useful sense, and the table makes that visible in a way that conversation does not.
The second is that somebody has been quietly absorbing the gap. There is often one person whose hours have crept outward at one end over months, and who has not mentioned it because each individual shift was small. The table is frequently the first time that person sees their own week drawn.
The third is that a shift somebody made deliberately bought less than they thought. Moving a start time earlier to catch one half usually buys an hour with that half and nothing at all with the other, and the person who made the shift is often the last to work that out.
Keeping it current
A table like this goes stale fast, because the things that change it — somebody moving, a new contractor, a change of shift — are exactly the things nobody announces.
Two habits keep it alive without ceremony. Put it somewhere people already look rather than in a document that has to be sought out. And make it part of whatever happens when somebody joins or leaves, so that updating it is somebody's job rather than nobody's.
Reviewing it on a fixed date works less well than it sounds, because the review date is never near the change.
What it does not do
The table does not create overlap and does not tell anybody what to do about its absence. It is a description.
It is worth being clear about that, because a table like this is sometimes produced in the hope that looking at the problem will suggest the answer. It will not. What it does is end the particular class of argument where two people disagree about the facts while both believing they are discussing what to do, which is a large enough class to be worth ten minutes.