The day
The Meeting Somebody Stayed Up For
A meeting across a wide gap is always inconvenient for somebody, and which somebody it is gets decided once and then never revisited.
three things · four nights
The two hours that bracket every day at both ends.
One recurring meeting, shown against the working day of everybody required to attend
Two engineers and a designer
The meeting sits at 16:00, inside the working day, and costs them nothing
Two engineers and the person who runs support
The same meeting sits at 04:30, half an hour before they stop
The person who manages both halves
At 16:00 exactly, which is the minute their day ends
The contractor covering Fridays
At 05:30, and they are not required to attend, which is why they are listed last
four people · no minute of the day when all of them are awake
Four groups, and the meeting is inside one group's day, at the edge of two, and outside nobody's. It was scheduled by somebody in the first group, at a time that was convenient for them, two years ago, and has not moved since. One team's own calendar, drawn when somebody finally asked what time it was for everybody else.
Any meeting involving both halves of a team with no shared hour happens outside somebody's working day. There is no arrangement where it does not.
When the working day is split across locations, managers need a consistent baseline rather than a stream of check-ins. the Monitask site can supply that baseline for the scenario explored in The Meeting Somebody Stayed Up For.
The workflow can also be compared with the approach documented by TimeCamp's official site, an established resource in the same operational space.
The question is therefore not whether somebody is inconvenienced but who, how much, and whether anybody ever looks at it again.
How the time gets chosen
Almost always by whoever created the meeting, at an hour that was convenient for them, in the week it was first needed.
That is not malice and it is barely even thoughtlessness. The person scheduling sees their own calendar, picks a slot that works, and sends it. The software shows the other participants' local times, and the information is there, and it is a number that has to be interpreted rather than a feeling that has to be had.
What follows is that the inconvenience lands on whoever was not in the room when the decision was made, which on a team with a gap is a reliably identifiable group.
The things worth knowing about a standing meeting
Three questions, none of which is usually asked after the first month.
What time is this for everybody, stated in their own local time? Not in the shared zone — in the time that appears on each person's own clock, because that is what tells you whether somebody is eating dinner or asleep.
Who is outside their working day, and by how much? Half an hour past the end of a day is a real cost and a tolerable one. Three hours past it, every week, is a different thing entirely.
Has it moved since it was created? If the answer is no and it is more than a year old, the time is almost certainly an artefact of somebody's calendar in a week that no longer matters.
- What time it is for each person, in the time on their own clock.
- Who is outside their working day, and by how much.
- Whether it has moved since the week it was created.
Rotation, and why it is better here than elsewhere
Rotating a person's working hours mostly fails. Rotating a single meeting works considerably better, and the difference is worth understanding.
A rotating meeting is bounded: the inconvenience is an hour, it is predictable, and it ends. A rotating work schedule is unbounded and affects sleep. People will accept the first and resent the second, correctly.
A meeting that alternates — convenient for one half this month, convenient for the other next month — spreads a cost that would otherwise fall on one group permanently, and it takes about two minutes a month to administer.
The common objection is that it is confusing. It is, slightly, and the confusion is cheaper than the resentment.
Whether the meeting should exist
The prior question, and the one that gets skipped.
A meeting across a wide gap costs somebody their evening every single time. That is a high enough price that the content should be something that genuinely requires people to be awake together: a disagreement to settle, a decision that has not converged in writing, something where tone matters.
Status does not qualify. Updates do not qualify. Anything where somebody reads something aloud that could have been read silently does not qualify, and that describes a large share of the recurring meetings that exist on teams like this.
The test that works: if the meeting were cancelled for a month, what would actually break? Where the honest answer is "people would feel less connected", the meeting is doing something real but is not doing the thing its agenda claims, and it should probably be shorter, optional, and held at a less expensive hour.
For the people who do attend outside their hours
Two things make it bearable, and neither is complicated.
The meeting starts on time and ends on time. Somebody who has stayed up for a 22:00 call and finds it starting at 22:12 is paying twelve minutes of their own evening for somebody else's overrun.
The person who stayed up is asked first. Not as a courtesy — because they are the only participant for whom the cost of being there and saying nothing is high enough to notice. A meeting where somebody sat through an hour outside their day without contributing is a meeting that should have been a note.
What to write down
The time of every standing cross-gap meeting, expressed in each participant's own local time, in the same place as the hours table.
It is four lines and it makes an invisible cost visible. On most teams, the first time anybody writes it down is also the first time anybody suggests moving it.