If you have ever worked across multiple time zones, you have heard some version of the same complaint: "It's so hard to find time to get everyone together." This is the wrong problem to solve.
The myth of synchrony — the belief that real work requires people to be present at the same time — is one of the most expensive cultural defaults in knowledge work. It produces meeting-heavy calendars, decisions that wait for quorum, and a baseline assumption that the workday is a shared object that everyone holds at the same time.
Time zones break this assumption by force. And that, it turns out, is a feature.
What distributed time actually gives you
When you can't be in the same room (or the same Zoom), you have to write things down. Decisions get documented because they have to be communicated, not just announced. Context gets written because it can't be absorbed by osmosis. The work becomes legible in a way that co-located work often isn't.
The teams I've worked with that were most distributed were also — not coincidentally — the teams with the best documentation, the clearest decision logs, and the most reliable handoffs. Not because they were better people. Because the time zone gap made legibility a survival requirement.
Synchrony is overrated. What you actually need is alignment — and alignment doesn't require a shared calendar block.