I am all for remote work and distributed teams. My husband has been working with distributed teams long before the pandemic hit as Stack Overflow was an early adopter of the “hire the best talent no matter where” trend.
But it does come with challenges. He contends that it’s helpful to have no more than six hours of time zones between core teams. And I’m really starting to see why. I’m really struggling to keep a decent sleep pattern and collaborate with Californians. So I’ve tried to stay up later so I’d have more working hours on American time zones. Plus I have a regular time with my therapist and for group therapy on Mondays that is 10pm and midnight in GMT+1. So I’ve got to stay up a bit later for that too.
I figured if I could wake up at 10am and go to sleep at 1am that would work great. I got myself a nice eye mask. I close the blinds. But hot damn if my body cannot tell that this is not when I should be sleeping. I can manage to stay up later but I’m still waking up with the sun. I cannot seem to sleep in past 8am.
So I think I’m going to give up this Circadian nightmare as I’m going to rack up a huge deficit. I’m just not a night owl. I’m a day person.