Between France and China there are roughly six or seven hours of difference depending on the season, which leaves a genuine overlap in the French morning and the Chinese late afternoon. That overlap is not the problem. The problem is that a question asked badly at 17:00 in Shenzhen is answered with a clarifying question at 09:00 in Paris, answered at 17:00 the next day in Shenzhen, and a two-minute decision has taken forty-eight hours.
Write questions that cannot bounce
- Ask a closed question with the options already listed. « A or B, and here is what each costs » gets answered; « what do you think? » does not.
- Include everything needed to answer: the photograph, the reference, the previous decision. Anything missing costs a full cycle.
- State the consequence of silence: « if I have no answer by Thursday I proceed with A ». This converts a pending question into a decision.
- Number your questions. Three numbered questions get three answers; three questions in a paragraph get one.
Use the overlap for what only it can do
The shared window is expensive and should be spent on what asynchronous work cannot do: disagreements, ambiguity, anything where tone matters, and anything that needs a decision from several people at once. Status updates, file transfers and confirmations should never occupy it — they work perfectly well written down.
The calendar problem nobody plans for
The two working calendars do not overlap either. Chinese New Year closes factories for weeks and the dates move every year; the French summer and the end of December empty European offices. Add the mid-autumn and national holidays on one side and the May public holidays on the other. Mapping both calendars onto one project plan at the start prevents the commitment that was never physically possible.
One shared written record of decisions, readable by both sides, replaces most of the messages. The cost of the time difference falls mainly on teams who keep the decisions in their inboxes.