It is not uncommon these days to have business associates, friends and family across the country and across the world. Thankfully, electronic forms of communication such as email and WhatsApp make it possible to have asynchronous interactions with them all, regardless of geography or time. Write a birthday note in New York at 2PM, and your buddy in Hong Kong can see it when he wakes up and thank you at his leisure. Your associate in Paris can annotate your PowerPoint over lunch, and you're able to review the suggestions in Los Angeles when you sign on after breakfast. True, events can overtake the exchange, rendering your reaction moot. Comment in the evening on the latest buddy that President Trump has gushed over, and by morning your comeback makes no sense as he is Elon non grata.
That said, there are times when you find it is better to actually (perish the thought) converse. I know, I know, it's an old fashion notion to have a conversation where one person talks, the other listens and responds, and round and round it goes. But it does cut to the chase and gets to a resolution quicker, not to mention saving your thumbs from all that pecking. The plus side is you get plausible deniability ("Well, do you have an email where I agreed to that proposal?"), while the downside is that there is the possibility of he said/she said ("I'm absolutely sure she said that they would make the reservation."). Even with those caveats, however, it cuts down on the back and forth, and gets issues resolved in real time.
The one challenge is that you have to find a singular point on the clock that works for both. Depending on where you are, dinner in Boston might be coffee in Seattle, while breakfast in San Diego might be lunch in Charlotte. Jump over an ocean, and the goal posts get farther apart: Amsterdam to Dallas is 7 hours, Chicago to Tokyo is 14 hours. That means that while one caller is hunched over their laptop with the annual budget the other is either stepping out of pub or slipping on their fuzzy slippers.
Most folks recognize this modern challenge, and roll with it as best they can. It might mean an early AM call after the gym, or one done in jammies just before bed. It's especially acute for connections in Asia, where no matter how you slice it's either extremely early or insanely late for one party or the other. On the plus side some folks are morning people, other night owls, and they can try and organize the timing of the conversation to hit their own personal sweet spot. That works about 50% of the time and then the situation reverses, making it alternately fair/unfair for each side.
You can have those challenges even within the same zip code, where the differentiator is not geography but rather age and habit. I had offered to connect a young woman with the folks at one of the nonprofits at which I work. The daughter of good friends, she is a high school student and was interested in joining me as a volunteer. Being a teenager, she texted me to chat about it in the middle of her most productive window, 1053PM. But I'm a slightly different demographic, and was busy snoring at that time. When I woke up I was tempted to text her to see if she wanted to talk, but 630AM was not likely a clock time she even knows exists. We eventually connected when our lives overlapped, talking after she woke up around lunch.
Writer and political commentator Tom Friedman wrote a book in 2005 called "The World is Flat." In it he postulated we live in a level playing field where countries, companies, and individuals can see eye to eye. Recent moves out of Washington take issue with that theory, but in terms of time it is more or less true. For while the clock might read differently depending on where you are standing, you can be reached effortlessly anywhere anytime. We just have to learn to roll with it. Or not. As the great comedian Henny Youngman put it, "I was just in London - there is a 6 hour time difference. When I go to dinner, I feel sexy. When I go to bed, I feel hungry. I'm still confused."
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Marc Wollin of Bedford is increasingly earlier to bed and earlier to rise. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.
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