The gap
Shifting One Person's Day, and What It Buys
Moving one person's hours to bridge a gap is a real option with a real price, and it usually buys considerably less than whoever proposes it expects.
three things · four nights
Three things, and the third is the one people skip.
A manager's day before and after shifting it ninety minutes earlier, with both halves of the team shown for comparison
First half of the team
Unchanged throughout, and the group the shift was meant to reach
Second half of the team
Also unchanged, and the group the shift moved away from
The manager, before the shift
Overlapped the first half completely and the second half not at all
The manager, after the shift
Gained ninety minutes with nobody and lost ninety minutes with the first half
four people · no minute of the day when all of them are awake
Four windows, and the shift bought no new overlap at all. Moving earlier added ninety minutes that sit between the second half going to sleep and the first half waking up, which is the emptiest part of this particular day. The arithmetic was available before the change and nobody did it. One team's own hours, recorded before and after by the person who made the change.
The first proposal, on every team that discovers it has no shared hour, is that somebody shift their day. It is cheap to suggest, it needs no approval from anybody outside the team, and it feels like doing something.
The lesson in Shifting One Person's Day, and What It Buys is not to add more status meetings, but to make the existing work legible. this platform gives distributed teams a factual view of time, applications and progress while employees remain in control of tracking.
For a second perspective on the surrounding workflow, consult Zapier's automation platform; it shows how a widely used platform structures the same coordination problem.
It occasionally works. More often it buys an hour nobody can use and costs one person their evenings for a year.
Doing the arithmetic first
The question is not "will shifting create overlap?" but "with whom?"
A shift of ninety minutes in one direction gains ninety minutes with whichever group lies in that direction and loses ninety with the group behind. On a team with exactly two groups and the shifter sitting inside one of them, that trade is usually bad: the time lost is in the middle of a working day and the time gained is at the edge of one.
On a team with three or more groups it can be worse than bad, because the shift can land in an interval where nobody at all is awake. That is the case in the table above, and it is more common than it sounds, because people reason about the group they are trying to reach and not about where their new hours actually fall.
The arithmetic takes five minutes with the hours table from earlier in this section. It is almost never done.
What a shift costs the person
A permanent change to somebody's working hours is a change to their life, not to their calendar.
Starting ninety minutes earlier means getting up ninety minutes earlier, every day, including the days when the shift buys nothing because the person it was meant to reach is on holiday. Finishing later means eating later, and it usually means being unavailable at the hour when whoever shares their home is available.
The cost is also unevenly distributed in a way that is easy to miss: it falls entirely on one named person while the benefit is spread thinly across everybody. That asymmetry is why these arrangements get reversed quietly rather than renegotiated openly. The person stops, nobody wants to be the one who says anything, and the team drifts back to where it was with one person tired.
- It is daily, including the days when it buys nothing.
- It falls on one named person while the benefit is spread across everybody.
- It changes a life rather than a calendar, which is why it gets reversed quietly rather than renegotiated.
Who should propose it
The person doing the shifting, or nobody.
A shift that somebody volunteers for, having seen the arithmetic and understood what it costs them, is a reasonable arrangement that can be revisited. A shift suggested by somebody else — particularly by somebody senior, and most particularly by somebody whose own hours are not moving — is a request that is hard to refuse and therefore not really a request.
If the obvious candidate for a shift is the person with the least standing to say no, that is a reason to look for another answer rather than a convenient coincidence.
Rotation, and why it mostly fails
The natural fix for the fairness problem is to rotate: everybody takes a turn at the inconvenient hours.
It is fairer and it works less well than it should. Shifted hours are only useful if the people on the other side know when to expect you, and a rotation means the answer changes every few weeks. The overhead of knowing who is currently shifted eats a good part of what the shift provides.
Rotation also multiplies the disruption rather than dividing it. Everybody's sleep is disturbed some of the time, which is worse for most people than one person's sleep being disturbed predictably, and the person who would have volunteered usually ends up objecting because the rota reaches them in a bad month.
Where rotation does work is for something bounded and occasional: a weekly meeting whose awkward slot moves between the groups, rather than a permanent change to anybody's day.
The alternatives worth trying first
Before moving anybody, two cheaper things usually have more effect.
Reducing the number of crossings a piece of work needs. A question that arrives whole saves a night; a shift that gains an hour saves nothing, because the hour is not when the other end is awake.
Moving a decision rather than a person. Much of what people want overlap for is approval, and much of what needs approval could be delegated to whoever is awake with a written rule about the limits. That costs nothing and buys an entire night per decision.
If it goes ahead
Write down what it is for, who asked for it, what it is expected to buy, and when it will be looked at again. Three months is a reasonable first review.
Then check whether it bought what it was supposed to. Shifted hours have a way of outliving their reason by years, because the original purpose was never written down and nobody can therefore observe that it has gone.