A collaboration with a team in Vietnam runs across a gap of six to seven hours from Western Europe, and eleven to twelve from the US east coast. The gap is not the hard part — the hard part is that most collaborations are designed as if it did not exist.
The actual overlap
Vietnam's working day is roughly 08:00 to 17:00 local. From Western Europe that is 02:00 to 11:00; the usable overlap is a couple of hours at the start of your day. From the US east coast it is 20:00 to 05:00 — there is effectively no overlap during normal working hours on either side.
Two consequences worth stating plainly:
Someone is always inconvenienced. Pretending otherwise produces a schedule that quietly puts the cost on one side.
Most of the work has to be asynchronous. A collaboration that depends on frequent live discussion will run at the speed of the meeting schedule, which is slow.
Sharing the inconvenience
Three practices that are noticed and remembered:
Alternate the awkward slot. If one meeting is early for them, the next is early for you. This is a small thing that signals a great deal about how the partnership is understood.
Never schedule into their evening without asking. A colleague who accepts a 21:00 call once will accept it every time; acceptance is not the same as it being reasonable.
Check the calendar, not just the clock. Tết falls on different Gregorian dates each year and the surrounding period is a genuine national break, not a working week with a holiday in it. Public holidays, exam periods and the academic calendar all differ.
What belongs in a live meeting
Given how scarce the overlap is, be deliberate about what it is spent on.
Worth a meeting: decisions with trade-offs, disagreements, anything involving someone's judgement rather than their information, the first conversation with a new team member, and anything where tone matters.
Not worth a meeting: status updates, sharing information one direction, reviewing a document that could be commented on in writing, and anything that ends with "so we'll think about it and come back".
A collaboration that fills its two-hour weekly window with status reporting has, in practice, no time for the conversations that actually need both sides present.
Asynchronous habits that work
Five, in order of how much difference they make:
Write decisions down where both sides can see them. A shared document of decisions, dated, with who decided what. Memory diverges quickly across a gap where nobody overhears anything.
State the deadline in both time zones. "Friday" is ambiguous by a day when the gap is twelve hours.
Send questions in batches, not as they arise. A stream of single questions means each one costs a full day's round trip. Ten questions in one message costs one day.
Reply with the answer, not with an acknowledgement. "I'll look at this tomorrow" costs a cycle and conveys nothing.
Record the meeting or write a short summary within the hour. Someone will always miss one, and the alternative is repeating it.
Failure modes
Four, and the first two are the common ones:
Silence read as agreement. No reply at 03:00 your time means the other side is asleep, not that they concur. Collaborations have proceeded for weeks on assumed agreement that did not exist.
The relationship thins out. Without corridor conversation, the collaboration becomes purely transactional, and transactional relationships do not survive the first real disagreement.
The counter is small and specific: spend the first five minutes of a call on something other than the agenda, and take any opportunity to meet in person — a conference, a visit — because one shared meal changes the tone of every subsequent call for a year.
One side ends up doing the coordination. Writing summaries, chasing responses, keeping the schedule. This is real work and it should rotate or be acknowledged.
Written English carrying more weight than intended. In writing, a direct sentence reads harder than the same sentence spoken, and a non-native writer may produce something blunter than they mean. Read for intent rather than tone, and when something seems sharp, ask rather than react.
Hybrid events
If part of the group is in a room and part is remote, the remote participants are disadvantaged by default: they cannot see side conversations, cannot signal to speak, and are easy to forget.
Three things that fix most of it: one person in the room whose job is to bring in remote participants, everyone in the room on their own microphone rather than one in the middle, and every document shared on screen rather than passed around the table.
What does not need fixing
The time gap has one genuine advantage worth using: work can move around the clock. A draft sent at the end of your day is read and returned by the time you start the next — provided both sides have agreed what "returned" means.
Collaborations that use this deliberately move faster than co-located ones. Those that fight the gap by trying to be simultaneous move slower than either.
What is the real overlap with Vietnam?
From Western Europe, a couple of hours at the start of your day; from the US east coast there is effectively no overlap during normal working hours on either side.
What should the scarce live meeting time be spent on?
Decisions with trade-offs, disagreements, anything requiring judgement, and anything where tone matters — not status updates or one-way information sharing.
Why is silence dangerous across a large time gap?
Because no reply means the other side is asleep, not that they agree — collaborations have run for weeks on assumed agreement that did not exist.
How do you keep the relationship from becoming transactional?
Spend the first five minutes of a call on something other than the agenda, and take any chance to meet in person — one shared meal changes the tone of calls for a year.
