One of the more complex things we have going on at Zemanta is working across nine time zones. Especially in my new role of VP of Product Development I cooperate a lot with people from our New York and San Francisco offices. So when I wake up in Ljubljana my inbox is full of requests and information coming from our American colleagues. I have time approximately up to 3pm Ljubljana time to process them, before Americans wake up and start generating new emails and calls. Consequently, the pace in Ljubljana office really heats up only in the afternoon, so when I finish my workday at around 6pm central European time, it feels like leaving work midday.
This week I’m experiencing things from the standpoint of our New York-based colleagues. It is 11:30 am now and in addition to have inbox full of emails coming from my Slovenian colleagues, I’ve also just spent two hours and a half on conference calls with them. This is definitely not a slow start of the day that I’m used to from Ljubljana! But on the other hand, when I was leaving New York office yesterday evening it really felt like the end of the day, not like a lunch break.
With increasingly more people working in a global setting, a completely new approaches and techniques for managing our workday and work-life integration will have to evolve. Just like industrial age brought about 9-5 work shifts, the globalized age will bring new ways of work organization. It might very well be, that we will return to the pre-industrial age arrangement where work and private lives were never separate affairs, but highly intermingled. If that’s to happen, our society will have to undergo almost a complete make over.
