Dualing Time Zones

One of the magical parts of globetrotting is time travel, not to the distant future, but you can travel back in time with the help of a long haul flight going against the earth’s spin.

Being the global citizen that I am, I live my life in numerous time zones.  Every time I pick up the phone, or send off an email, I’m thinking of what time it is at some other place in the world.

Typically when I get into the office in Washington, we have the morning to overlap with our field offices and coordinate on anything that needs to be done in the office.  In addition to working in several time zones in Africa, we also have two offices in Europe and one in California, so it is really a constant monitoring of time. 

Here in Nairobi, there is a whole different spin that is experienced.  Things are relatively quiet at the moment.  A few folks are starting to wake up in Washington.  One of our European offices is on holiday, so things are quiet on that end.

The reality is that there is almost always another office working, feeding more work to you in your sleep.  Typically when I get into the office I have around a hundred plus messages that have come in from around the globe, some from California that were working after we signed off for the night, with others from Africa and Europe, almost done with their days.

The challenge, of course, is maintaining any type of balance with work coming at all times of the day.  Working in the field, Washington is still busily working throughout your evening.  The challenge comes when I’ve been working such long hours that I end up working after the Washington office has already signed off. 

This time around I’ve had a particularly busy work load, staying up until midnight to two am working on getting everything done.  I realize that one can only do this for so long, and hope that over the next couple of weeks things will settle down a bit. 

Luckily this weekend I head to Mombasa, where I will try to forget about time altogether!

Cheers,

Miel