Shaken

On time zones, calendar chaos, and the scramble to find a place to sleep

It’s 5p local time and I’ve been off work for 3 hours. I’ve been to the store for dinner supplies, cooked, eaten, cleaned up, and now I’m sitting here reflecting on the day. However unconventional my way of life is, I love it wholeheartedly. We live on the West Coast and work East Coast hours. With brutal honesty I can say it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I’ve always been more productive in the mornings, so working earlier and ending when I hit my afternoon slump has been game-changing. I started this time shift while still working a corporate gig and have continued to embrace it while working on my start-up.

But living life with a time shift like this can complicate things. My partner and I had to set “rules” around how we talk about things. Work events are spoken in Eastern times, personal events are local — except when our work calls are with people on the West Coast and then it’s West Coast time and if we’re on the East Coast traveling then personal calls end up being Eastern times. It gets crazy and twisted and sometimes a lot. Thankfully we’ve never missed a meeting — business or personal — but it also means I keep three concurrent calendars running and all synced to my phone on whatever the local time is so we don’t miss anything.

And to complicate things further our housesitting schedule, which is usually booked several weeks in advance, can sometimes change on extremely short notice. Recently we had less than four weeks notice about a cancellation and we spun our wheels hard to find a replacement sit. I think at most we had six open applications across a variety of dates that all mostly connected the gap. It was a lot of sitting on the app constantly refreshing, scheduling calls, intros, and in-person visits. I think we had more personal events than work events across those eight days. Thankfully we pulled it off, but it added another layer of stress on top of an already busy schedule and put extra pressure on us to find anything that fit these specific dates. That’s not usually how it works for us. So now we’re fighting feelings of FOMO with regard to certain sits we applied for but didn’t respond in time before we wanted to commit to something.

But all in all, with only three poor experiences in over 15 sits, we’re lucky. And being able to choose work hours that best fit our work life is a privilege I’ll never not appreciate. And every time I sign off at 2p on a Friday afternoon, I can’t help thinking how great my life is and that I wouldn’t trade it for the world. For now, I’ll dream of my Friday evening full of drinks, dinner, and the SoCal golden hour across the hills.