When your team spans four time zones, the meeting is the enemy. Every sync you schedule costs someone their evening or their morning, and the meeting-heavy habits that felt fine in one office quietly break when the office is a map. Across distance, working asynchronously becomes the operating model, the default the whole team is built around.

Write it down or it did not happen

Decisions made in a call vanish for everyone who was asleep when the call happened. If it matters, it lives in a document with a clear owner and a date, not in someone's memory and not in a thread that scrolls away. The discipline of writing decisions down is what lets a team work across sixteen hours of difference without re-deciding everything each morning.

Make status boring and visible

Nobody should have to ask what is happening. A board anyone can read in thirty seconds beats a stand-up that only three people in the right time zone can attend. Aim for a company where the answer to "where does this stand?" is a link, not a meeting.

If the answer only exists in someone's head, your team is offline for half of every day.

Protect the overlap window

You still get a couple of precious hours where zones overlap. Do not spend them on status a document could carry. Spend them on what async is genuinely bad at: hard conversations, fast unblocking, and building the human trust that makes all the written communication work.

What holds up across zones:

Written decisions over verbal ones, always
A single clear owner on every task and every document
Public channels by default, private messages by exception

Default to trust, not surveillance

Async only works if you measure people by what they produce, not by when they are online. Set clear outcomes, give people the freedom to hit them on their own clock, and judge the work. The moment you start policing hours across time zones, you have thrown away the main advantage of working this way.