I Logged Every Early and Late Call on My Team for a Month

My phone buzzes at 5:47 a.m. The call isn’t until 6, but I’ve learned I need thirteen minutes to be a person who can talk. There’s a specific kind of cold that comes from standing at the counter waiting for coffee to drip while it’s still dark outside and your laptop is already open on the table, screen too bright for the room. By the time I’m on, it’s 9 a.m. for the two people in New York, 2 p.m. for the one in London, and 6:30 p.m. for the one in Bangalore, who is, every single week, the only person on the call who slept a normal amount the night before.

I run a nine-person engineering team spread across four time zones, and for one month I logged what our recurring meetings actually cost, in wake times, alertness, and how much anyone on the early or late end of the call actually said. The short version: the person on the bad end of the clock isn’t just tired, they’re quieter, and quieter people get worse outcomes from meetings even when they show up on time. The rest of this is what a month of tracking that looked like, and the one change that moved the number.

The team, for context: me and one other engineer in Portland, three people in New York, one in London, and three in Bangalore. No meeting time is convenient for all four locations at once, and never will be. The real question isn’t “how do we find the good time” — it’s whose morning or evening gets spent, and whether the same person spends theirs every week without anyone noticing.

What I actually tracked

Nothing fancy. After each recurring call for 30 days, I noted my wake time, a 1-to-5 alertness rating right after hanging up, and whether I’d said anything beyond an acknowledgment. I asked three teammates to do the same informally; two stuck with it for most of the month.

I want to be straight about what this is and isn’t. It’s not a controlled study, and I didn’t record a timestamped log every single day without gaps, so where the numbers below are averages across days I actually have notes for, not all 30, I say so. A few of the smaller scenes and quotes are reconstructed from memory and Slack messages rather than pulled verbatim from a recording, since nobody was running a recorder at 6 a.m. I’ve tried to keep the reconstructed parts close to what actually happened rather than shaped for the story, but they’re not a transcript.

What the alertness numbers looked like

Across the days I have full notes for, my own alertness rating right after a normal-hours call (any call inside my regular 9-to-6) averaged 4.1 out of 5. On the days I had a 6 a.m. call, it averaged 2.6. That’s not surprising by itself. What was more useful was tracking whether I said anything substantive, meaning more than “sounds good” or “yep, agreed” — on normal-hours calls I contributed something real to the discussion in about four out of five meetings. On early calls, roughly one in three. The meeting still happened. I was just mostly furniture in it.

The teammate in Bangalore, on the other side of our schedule, showed the same pattern for the calls that landed at 9 or 10 p.m. his time versus the ones during his normal day. Being awake and present is not the same as being able to think, and a recurring meeting scheduled for someone’s dead zone gets attendance without getting the person. Even in one office, a standup already struggles to tell presence from actual delivery; spreading it across four time zones just widens that gap into something measurable.

Async didn’t make the cost disappear, it moved it

Partway through the month we cut one of two weekly syncs and replaced it with a written async update, on the theory that this would obviously help the people on bad time zones. It helped less than expected, for a reason I hadn’t priced in: reading and reacting to a thread that six people already argued about while you slept is its own kind of tiring. You’re catching up on decisions that already happened, without the shortcuts a live conversation gives you, like tone, or a quick “wait, say that again.” One teammate put it to me in a Slack message I saved because it stuck: “I’d rather be tired for twenty minutes live than spend forty minutes tired reading what I missed.” Async is cheaper for whoever was asleep during the discussion, and more expensive for whoever’s now piecing it together a day later.

By the end of the month our actual rule was narrower than “go async”: reserve live meetings for things that need real disagreement worked out in real time, and push status and updates to writing. That cut our live meeting count by roughly a third without pushing more reading onto the people already paying the timezone cost the hardest.

The rotation experiment, and a shift-work study that predicts why it worked

For the first two weeks, the 6 a.m. slot was just mine, the way these things go, because I’d set the meeting up originally and nobody had ever revisited it. For the back two weeks, we rotated it: I took the early slot for a few days, then handed it to a teammate on Eastern time who moved theirs an hour earlier, then to London. Two things changed. Alertness scores across the team, averaged, went up slightly, which is what you’d expect from spreading a cost around. More interesting was that the direction we rotated in mattered more than I expected.

There’s a well-known 1982 study, published in Science by Charles Czeisler, Martin Moore-Ede, and Richard Coleman, that looked at rotating shift schedules at a Utah chemical plant and found something that translates directly to a meeting rotation: schedules that rotated shifts forward (day to evening to night, delaying the body clock each time) produced far better sleep, health, and turnover outcomes than schedules that rotated backward (advancing the clock each time), because most people’s internal clocks find it much easier to shift later than earlier. I hadn’t thought of a meeting rotation as a shift-rotation problem until I read that. But it’s the same problem in miniature. Asking someone to wake up progressively earlier each week to take their turn on the bad slot is the hard direction. Letting the rotation move the other way, so a person’s “turn” pushes their day later rather than earlier where possible, is the easy direction. We didn’t fully rebuild the rotation around this in one month, but the two swaps we made in the easy direction were the ones nobody complained about.

The same logic applies to on-call engineering rotations, which is probably why it felt familiar. Nobody would design a pager rotation where one person is permanently on call and everyone else never is. A recurring cross-timezone meeting is an on-call rotation that most teams never notice they built.

The actual failure mode wasn’t tiredness, it was oversleeping through the alarm

The other thing the log surfaced, which I hadn’t set out to measure, was how often the early-slot person was late or missing entirely. Over the first two weeks, with me on the 6 a.m. slot solo and a single phone alarm, I was late or absent three times out of ten calls. Not because I forgot. Because a body that expects to sleep until 7:30 is extremely good at silencing a 5:47 alarm and going back under for twenty more minutes, in a way that feels, from the inside, completely reasonable in the moment and indefensible five minutes later.

For the second half of the month I switched to using DontSnooze for that slot, mostly because I already had it from an earlier experiment logging my own snooze habits and figured it couldn’t hurt. The part that mattered for this log wasn’t the app so much as who I pointed it at: two teammates who had their own stake in the meeting starting on time, and who would know either way. Lates dropped to zero for the rest of the tracking period. It didn’t make the 6 a.m. call less tiring, and it didn’t make the meeting itself any better once I was there. It solved a narrower problem: getting my actual body out of bed on a schedule I didn’t want to be on, at an hour where willpower alone had a bad track record for me.

Two real limits. First, it does nothing about who’s assigned the bad slot in the first place; that’s a scheduling decision, not an alarm problem, and no app fixes a rotation nobody revisits. Second, the teammate in London who took one of our rotated early slots is on Android, and the app is iOS-only right now, so the fix didn’t travel across the whole team. It solved my early-call problem, not the team’s.

What I’d actually change on a global team, based on the log

Track the cost before arguing about it. A month of rough notes turned “the early call is kind of annoying” into a number worth acting on. Rotate the bad slot instead of parking it with whoever tolerated it first, and when you can choose the direction, rotate it later rather than earlier, the way Czeisler’s shift-work research suggests. Reserve live meetings for things that actually need real-time disagreement, since async has its own cost and just relocates the problem rather than solving it. And keep “am I awake” separate from “am I sharp.” An alarm can fix the first. Nothing but a better hour fixes the second.

If you’re on a team spread across four or five time zones and this sounds familiar, it’s worth doing the same rough log for two weeks before proposing any fix. The number that convinces a team to change a recurring meeting is rarely a feeling. It’s a log someone bothered to keep, the same instinct behind tracking a chronotype shift for six weeks instead of just guessing at what would help. The gap between a 6 a.m. alarm and a body that wants to wake at 8 is not really different in kind from the gap between work-day and free-day sleep that gets called social jetlag; a rotating global meeting schedule just recreates it on a shorter cycle, week after week, for whoever’s turn it is.

One thing the log made obvious that I hadn’t expected: nobody had decided the Bangalore engineers would eat the 9 p.m. slot forever. Someone had just picked a convenient time back when the team was smaller and more concentrated, the team grew elsewhere, and the invite never got revisited because touching a recurring meeting feels like a bigger deal than it is. If a standing meeting on your team has run at the same time for over a year, that alone is worth checking against who’s actually on it now.

FAQ

How can distributed teams reduce the toll of timezone-spanning meetings on the people who wake up early or stay up late for them?

Rotate the bad slot, and where there’s a choice, rotate it in the direction that delays a person’s day rather than advances it, since most people’s clocks shift later more easily than earlier. Then cut the live meetings that don’t truly need everyone at once.

How do you schedule meetings across time zones without burning out one person?

Make the cost visible instead of assumed. A rough log of who took the early or late slot turns a vague complaint into something a team can plan around, the way a team manages an on-call rotation rather than leaving one engineer permanently on call.

Is async or sync better for a global remote team?

Neither wins by default. Async spares whoever would otherwise be awake at an odd hour but charges the catch-up cost instead. The split that worked for us: live meetings for actual disagreements, writing for everything else.

How can I make sure I’m reliably awake for an early or late team call?

A phone alarm alone has a weak track record outside your normal wake window, because the half-asleep version of you is good at turning it off and going back under. What worked in my own log was a check someone else could see once the alarm fired.