Tumblelight

Time zones are deceptively easy. I mean how hard can it be to detract or add a few hours? Well, it turns it is tough – real tough. Here’s a tip on how to figure out when people in different time zones can meet.

Why is it so hard?

The arithmetic might be easy, but it’s easy to get confused when try to figure out who has switched to summer time and if the mail thread is still talking in CET or PST. Then there is culture and just plain personal preference which make things even harder.

The trick is to look beyond the zones themselves. It’s not a question of figuring out “office time in KL vs. SF” – it’s all about the peeps. The goal is to match people’s lives against each other.

Here’s a simple tip on how to figure out when people can meet.
The short story: Get people’s preferred meeting times, a.k.a their “profiles”, assemble the team(s) and average everyone’s pain levels. Finally build a “meeting pain” diagram where the valleys are the sweet spots you’re looking for.

For the longer explanation we need some spreadsheet magic. In the first tab we collect everyone’s preferences, their profiles. We will reused further on.

Figure: The first tab in this time zone sweet spot analysis contain all the people. They have entered their typical daily “profile”, i.e. when it’s ok to disturb them or not. Hint: red is no good.

The tab we organise according to the time zones. The dark grey top left cell “12” is New Zealand time zone (GMT+12), then onwards through Malaysia (GMT+8) and so on. Note that GMT+0 is the point of reference and the other time zones merely say the corresponding hour. To the far right you can find the people in California (to the right of “-8”).

Invite the people and ask them to rate the hours on a typical day throughout the 24 hours. Yeah, this is for startup purposes – it’s a hard life around the clock. Now you can align people’s lives, not just their time zones.

Side note: The column “Combo GMT+1” is just a handy way to understand the joint profile of the people working in Sweden in this case.

Figure: On a new tab we assemble the people needed for “Team X”. It is a simple case of creating references to columns in the first tab. To this we add a summing up column “Meeting Pain”, see far left.

On this second tab above we collect the people to join Team X. It is slightly tedious to copy and paste the references, but once you get the hang of it it’s straight forward work. Next step is to introduce a column “Meeting pain” where you calculate the average of the participants for every hour. The GMT+0 column is there so that we can have a normalised x-axis in the diagram we’re creating.

Figure: Finally we arrive at the diagram. Lower is better, less pain to meet.

This team’s sweet spot is around 8 o’clock in the morning (GMT) with a runner-up 12 hours later at 20:00 CET just before the eastern person “BB” goes to bed.

In conclusion: By relating people’s lives via time zones – everyone thinks about their life in their zone – we stand to figure out when they are more likely to meet.

Oh, and a surprise insight: In principle I could only find two types of profiles – parent or not.

Figure: Two types of profiles – those with kids (DD) and those without (EE).

In the figure to the left we can see examples of the two types. Person “DD” is a typical parent – morning time is early and the dinner is sacred, but then this person typically makes up for a bad (work) conscience by kicking in later that evening.

The other type “EE” has no kids and sleeps a bit later in the morning, but has no qualms about meeting and eating. However, this type of person prefer to round off the evening without work.

With three kids of my own, I can certainly understand both DD and EE…

/Björn

Ps. I almost forgot. Here’s an example Google spread sheet page if you want to copy it:
http://bit.ly/12sg6R7

Tags: distributed, teams, time

This entry was posted on May 2, 2013 at 18:02 and is filed under Agile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.