Hire a freelancer who works your hours

Ask for an interval, not a state

Available is a state and it means whatever the person needs it to mean. At their desk from 09:00 to 18:00 their time is an interval, and an interval can be checked against a calendar. Ask these, verbatim:

“On a normal Tuesday, what time do you start and what time do you stop — in your own time, not mine?”

“What’s the latest you’ll take a call, and how often does that happen in a month?”

“When you say you’re free at 22:00 your time — is that your normal day, or is that for me?”

The third question is the one that matters. Somebody agreeing to your hours is often agreeing to a night shift. Night shifts work for about a month. Then the replies get slower, and neither of you connects it to the thing that was agreed in week one.

Get the hours in writing, with a date attached

Two lines in the engagement, and they prevent most of what goes wrong:

• The window, in both timezones, with both zone names spelled out. “09:00–18:00 Asia/Manila, which is 21:00–06:00 America/New_York.” Named zones, not offsets — an offset is wrong twice a year.
• A named date to re-check it. Daylight saving moves the US, the UK and Australia on different dates, so for a few weeks each spring and autumn the overlap you agreed is not the overlap you have. Put a reminder in for the fortnight when the offsets disagree, not for the day the clocks change.

Add one more line if any of the work is time-critical: what happens when something breaks outside the window. Not a promise of instant response — a stated rule. “Anything urgent goes to email; it is picked up at the start of the next window.” A stated rule you can plan around beats an implied availability that quietly costs somebody their evening.

What a record here prints

Every record shows the hours that person is at their desk, in their own time, alongside the skills and the rate. The record sheet also prints, computed on the server, how that window overlaps an ordinary working day in four places — US Pacific, US Eastern, UK, and eastern Australia — against a real date, so daylight saving is already accounted for.

Four hours of overlap is a structural judgement, not a measurement: it is the amount that reliably fits a decision, a question and an answer into one shared day. Whether your own work needs more or less than that is the subject of how much overlap you actually need, and the answer for a lot of work is less.

Run the first two weeks so the hours matter less

Overlap is expensive. Most of what people buy it for can be bought more cheaply with a shape:

• One standing meeting, at the front of the window, not the end. A question raised at the start of the overlap gets answered inside it. The same question raised at the end waits a day.
• Questions batched into one message rather than arriving one at a time. This is a request you make explicitly at the start; almost everybody does it happily and almost nobody does it unasked.
• Decisions in writing, in one place. Anything agreed on a call that isn’t written down did not survive the timezone.
• An end-of-day note: what moved, what is blocked, what needs an answer before their next start. Five lines. It converts your overlap requirement from “hours per day” into “one answer per day”, which is a much cheaper thing to buy.

If you take two days to answer questions, no amount of overlap will help you.

Before you commit to the schedule, test it

Put the hours into the trial rather than into the interview. A short paid piece of work run inside the real window tells you whether the window is real: whether messages get answered inside it, whether the end-of-day note arrives, whether the standing meeting is one they can actually keep. How to brief and trial a freelancer is the procedure; add one line to it — “reply times during the stated window” — and grade that alongside the work.

And do the rest of the checking anyway. Somebody in a convenient timezone is not thereby a safe hire: how to vet a freelancer before you hire is the shorter version of that argument. The published bar every record here is read against is at /standard.