How to Manage Time Zones When Home Keeps Moving
Show two zones on the calendar and protect sleep like a meeting nobody may move.
[ journal ]
My calendar now prints two zones in the event title. Auckland, and whoever I owe the hour to. Sleep is a block with the same dignity as a standup. Nobody gets to “just hop on” inside it. The body-clock problem is a different essay. This one is about not lying to the software.
When home keeps moving, the failure mode is a single zone that pretends to be truth. You accept a 9am that is 2am, or a 4pm that is breakfast, because the invite looked civil in their city. I annotate local time on every call I did not create. I keep a default zone for deadlines so “end of day” means one place. If I am in Tāmaki Makaurau for a month, end of day is here, written down, not implied.
Protected sleep is a calendar artifact. Recurring. Named. Do Not Disturb tied to it so a ping from another hemisphere does not win by default. Relocation fatigue is real, and it is mostly this: you keep saying yes to hours that would be rude if everyone were in the same room. Distance makes people polite in email and greedy in scheduling.
I batch the painful overlaps. US afternoon into two windows a week when I can, not a drip of 6am surprises. Europe gets a late block or it gets async. World clocks on the phone are a glance, not a personality. The glance happens before I accept.
Louisiana to Aotearoa is a long arithmetic. I still get it wrong when I am tired and trying to be easy. The correction is mechanical. Two zones visible. Sleep owned. Deadlines pinned to a city I am actually sleeping in. When I change bases I update the default that week, not “once I settle.” There is no settle. There is the next invite.
If a team cannot live with a written overlapping window, they wanted an office with a suitcase. I will write the window in the doc. I will not donate the night and then call it flexibility.
— JV · Dark Heart Labs.