24 Nov 2025 · 4 min
John Jonas explains why forcing virtual assistants to work your timezone ruins their health and suggests better approaches: let them work their local daytime with asynchronous handoffs, schedule predictable overlap windows for live calls, or explicitly hire for graveyard shifts and pay accordingly.
Hello and welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast, the podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing your work. My name is John Jonas and this is episode seven. How do I deal with time zones with someone on the other side of the world? So when I first hired someone, the agency that I went through said, hey, do you want them to work on your time zone? And I was like, oh, sure, I guess. I mean, I didn't really know that was an option, but, yeah, sure. So they give me this guy who doesn't really know anything and he starts working on my time zone. So he's working the night shift. Now, if you're in Australia, this is not really an issue because they're on basically the same time zone as you, but if you're anywhere else in the world, the us, Canada, uk, they're on a different side of the world. So I think they're 12 hours ahead of Pacific Time and 14 hours ahead of Eastern Time, 15 hours ahead of Eastern time, and that changes according to daylight savings. So basically exactly on the other side of the world. So here's what I found. Someone working the night shift, it is really, really hard for them especially, it's lonely. They're on their own, they have to motivate themselves. And they're working in the dark, their family's asleep, they're worried about waking people up. It's a hard situation. So after a couple weeks, he said to me, hey, sir, would it be okay if I worked during the day? This is really hard for me. It's affecting my health. I'm not sleeping during the day, I'm not sleeping at night. It's affecting my family. And there's not really anything that I'm doing that requires me to be on your time zone. And I didn't really realize that it was hurting him so much. And I was like, oh, sure, that's not a problem at all. You can definitely work on, on your own daytime. And we've done it ever since, and it's never been an issue. What I find is that any of my people who are not working the night shift, which we do have a few people, our customer service team, we make sure that we are double covering all shifts. So we have people that work at night. But otherwise I find that my time, my working day overlaps with their working day at some point. So you'll find that you have people that are either either night owls or they're morning people. And either way, their time overlaps with my time at 9 or 10 or 11am or their time overlaps at 2 or 3 or 4 or 5pm and so during the day I get to interact with almost every one of the people that work for me if I want to. Now, I don't necessarily need to, other than through email or through a project management system, but I find there are, there are some hours where we overlap together that if I need to communicate with them in live, I can. And you'll find that with almost all of your people. So if you need someone that needs to work the graveyard shift so that they're live on your time, what I recommend you do is in your job post, when you post on onlinejobs pH, let them know this is a graveyard shift position. You'll be working 9am to 5pm Eastern time or whatever it is. That way you can find someone who's already used to working that shift. It'll be way, way easier for them. So you can like ask them. Once people have contacted you, you can ask them, hey, what's your current working schedule like? Or when have you worked a graveyard shift? Or, you know, how used to this are you? Because if they're not used to it, it's really hard. But you can definitely find people who are used to it. And then you have someone working on your time zone. So for me, all of our work gets done asynchronously. So they work at night, I work during my day, they work my night, I work my day, they get work done, I give them feedback the next day and then they go back to work at night. So all of the work on my team happens while I'm asleep generally. And it's really kind of nice to have my daytime not being bothered by people and I can be productive on my own. And then I give them feedback and then they go do their work at night and they try and figure stuff out on their own. And if they get stuck, then they ask me and maybe I lose a couple hours of productivity. And to me that's okay. That's how I deal with time zones. You may find something different, but generally those are the situations that I find that people run into. My name is John Jonas. Thanks for listening. See you on the next episode.
