Sick Design: Tempus Difficultus
(Latin: Time Fatigue, or Difficulty with Time Differences)
You pick up a client who has teams in Beijing, Paris, and Toronto. You need everybody’s feedback, but you know you’re going to be the one putting in the late hours. 9PM calls for the win! Guess you’re gonna come down with a serious case of time fatigue!
COMMON SYMPTOMS:
- Multi-hour spans of wasted time before movement can happen on a project
- Sleep deprivation
- Consistent lag on getting decisions made
- Too much devotion of time to one project or client over another
CAUSES:
- Clients/stakeholders in different time zones
- Too many linear methods of communication (ie. emails, chat, fax)
- The size of the earth
REMEDIES:
Sometimes in these scenarios, you’re just gonna have to bite the bullet and deal with the time difference and time fatigue. Calls can be incredibly valuable time savers when you are trying to move a critical stage of your project forward.
They are far more efficient than emails. Make sure entering into it you create consistent check-ins and set realistic expectations of when call time’s work for you both.
Use Tools to Combat Time Fatigue
Also, try to leverage tools to compliment your calls, so it’s not a rushed conversation to cover every single thing in one call.
Email can sometimes be too linear. Things can get lost in Slack. We use our internal tool Notable to house assets and have dynamic conversations that are easy to reference and contextual at the same time. Find a central repository that works best for you.
