Notes on Client Communication Across Time Zones
Write the SLA before the flight. Status in writing. Silence is not timezone courtesy; it is a surprise.
[ journal ]
Silence is not timezone courtesy. It is a status incident. Before I change cities, I write down what clients can expect: hours I will answer, hours I will not, where status lives, and what I am travelling does and does not mean. Then I send it. A Slack status is not a contract. A short email is.
I keep one place for written status. Not a trail of chats across three tools. The platform-sprawl note is about not multiplying those tools. This is about the promise: you will not have to guess whether I saw the message. If I cannot reply, the status already says when I will. If the work is blocked, I write the block. I do not wait for morning in their city to mention a problem I already have in mine.
SLAs I can keep beat SLAs that sound devoted. Four hours in overlapping time, next business morning otherwise, is a sentence I have used. Overnight miracles are not a timezone. They are a person skipping sleep. I do not offer them.
When the offset is ugly, Auckland to US afternoon, I batch replies. I do not drip one-line messages at 1am that look like I am around. I am not around. I am protecting the next day’s sentences. A single written update with the state of the work is kinder than a green dot.
If I will be offline for a flight or a ferry with no signal, I say so in advance with a return time. Surprise silence is how people invent stories. I would rather they have a boring sentence.
Clients hired the work, not my itinerary. I do not narrate the harbour. I narrate the deliverable, the risk, and the next checkpoint. The rest of the city can stay in the journal.
— JV · Dark Heart Labs.