Tokyo wakes up at what is Valencia's bedtime. For most of the year, we have sixteen hours of asynchronous overlap and four hours where both of us are actually awake at the same time.
The first instinct is to treat this as a bug — a drag on collaboration that needs meetings and call-schedules to fix. We spent three weeks trying. It ruined both of our mornings.
The fix was to stop treating async as the fallback. Now the four live hours are reserved for the decisions that need voice — pricing, positioning, the one-way doors. Everything else gets written down. Writing is slower than talking, which is the point; a bad idea can't survive the time it takes to write it clearly.
Writing is slower than talking — which is the point.
Working across timezones doesn't mean working half as hard. It means writing more than you speak, and letting the sun do the handoff.