The continuous working day, and how to actually use it
Karachi to Auckland is a sixteen hour spread. Most regional teams treat it as a scheduling problem. It is closer to a second shift.
Auckland is finishing when Karachi is starting. Between them the region covers a working day that never fully closes, and the default use of that fact is to complain about the call time.
Handover beats overlap
The instinct is to find the hour everyone can attend. That hour is early for some and late for others, so it is the worst hour in the day for the people in it, and it converts a sixteen hour advantage into one tired meeting.
The alternative is to run work as a relay: a market finishes a stage and hands it east or west with a written handover, and the receiving market starts on it while the sending one sleeps. Production, edit rounds and reporting all suit this. Strategy does not, and should not be forced into it.
What a handover has to contain
- What was decided, not what was discussed.
- What the next market is expected to return, and by when in their own clock.
- The one open question, if there is one. More than one open question means the stage was not finished.
A round of edits that takes three days in one time zone takes one across three, but only if the handover is written down.
