How much overlap you actually need

Measure your own requirement before you search

For one week, keep a note. Every time somebody working for you had to wait on a decision from you for more than an hour, make a mark. At the end of the week you have a number of decisions per day. That number, not a preference, is your overlap requirement.

Most people who ask for a full working day of overlap are running work that needs one decision a day. One decision a day fits in ninety minutes.

Three shapes of work, and what each actually needs

Deliverable work against a clear brief. Design comps, editing, bookkeeping, writing, most production work. An hour or two, or none. What this work needs is not overlap; it is a good brief and a fixed review slot. Buying overlap here is buying a cure for a briefing problem, and it does not work — a vague brief consumes as much of a shared afternoon as you give it.

Work with live dependencies. Development against a product that is changing under it, anything touching a third-party integration, support work, anything where being blocked stops the day. Around four hours. The requirement is not conversation; it is that a question asked can be answered and the answer acted on inside the same working day. Four hours does that with room for one review round.

Work with a live audience. A call you are both on, incident response, a launch window, anything where somebody outside is waiting. You do not need overlap; you need the hours themselves. Hire for the hours and say so plainly in the brief, so the person accepting knows what they are accepting.

What overlap does not fix

• A slow decision-maker on your side. If you take two days to answer, eight hours of shared time buys nothing. Fix the answering first; it is free.
• An unclear brief. More conversation about an unclear brief produces more conversation.
• Too many people in the loop. Overlap with one person is a schedule. Overlap with a committee is a coincidence.
• Work that is genuinely blocked on somebody else. Overlap moves the wait; it does not remove it.

Making a small overlap work

Four habits, and together they convert an “hours per day” requirement into a “one answer per day” requirement:

• One standing meeting, at the front of the window. A question raised at the start of the overlap gets an answer inside it; the same question at the end waits a day.
• Questions batched. One message with everything in it, not six arriving over an afternoon. Ask for this explicitly at the start.
• An end-of-day note. What moved, what is blocked, what needs an answer before their next start. Five lines is enough. This is the highest-value habit on the list and it costs nothing.
• Decisions written down where both of you can find them. Anything agreed on a call and not written down did not survive the timezone.

A window that wraps midnight — somebody working 21:00 to 06:00 their own time — is a normal arrangement, and often the one you want, because it lands squarely in a working day somewhere else. Do ask whether it is their ordinary week or an accommodation being made for you, because the two behave very differently by month three.

Daylight saving will move the number you agreed

This is the part that catches everyone. The US, the UK and Australia change their clocks on different dates, and the southern hemisphere changes in the opposite direction. For a few weeks each spring and autumn, the overlap in your agreement is not the overlap you have — sometimes an hour more, sometimes an hour less, occasionally on the wrong side of the meeting you both keep.

Two defences, both cheap. Write the window with named timezones rather than offsets, because an offset is a snapshot and a zone name is a rule. And put a reminder in the calendar for the weeks when the two zones disagree, not for the day either one changes.

What this site does with the number

Every record shows the hours that person is at their desk, in their own time, and the record sheet prints how that window overlaps an ordinary working day in US Pacific, US Eastern, the UK and eastern Australia — computed on the server against a real date, so the daylight-saving problem above is already handled.

Four hours is a judgement, not a measurement, and this page is the argument for it: four hours is what reliably fits one question, one answer and one review into a shared day.

If you know your own answer already, go to hire a freelancer who works your hours for the questions that turn a stated schedule into a real one. If the work is going to be defined by a brief rather than by hours — which, per the first section, is most work — how to brief and trial a freelancer is the better place to spend the effort. The bar every record here is read against is the standard.