Being always on is not a service standard

Do you run your business from airports and hotel rooms, and find yourself answering messages at hours no one should be awake?

It starts as a courtesy. A client in another city sends a question, you reply within minutes, and they are impressed. So you do it again. Within a few months, fast replies have become the product, and your phone has become the office.

The easy explanation is that you are travelling too much. Usually you aren't. The real problem is that the business only works when you are live, and every time zone you cross adds another set of hours in which you are expected to be.

It is one of the most common patterns I see in owners who work across borders, and most of them have stopped noticing it.

Build the week before you board

The fix is to decide, before the week starts, when you will be live and when you will not — and to move everything else into writing.

Most owners try to solve this by being more disciplined about notifications. That fails, because the pressure isn't coming from the phone. It comes from clients and staff who have learned that a live answer is the only reliable way to get one. Change what they can rely on, and the pressure changes with it.

In practice, that means four things:

• Time-block around the overlap. Look at where you will be and where your clients are, and find the two or three hours each day when both of you are awake and working. Those hours are for live calls. The rest are for thinking, writing and sleeping.
• Move routine communication to written updates. A short update at the same point each week answers most of the questions that would otherwise arrive as calls. Agree a response window with each client — within one business day, say — and then keep it every time.
• Give someone the authority to act. Name one person who can make decisions up to an agreed limit when you are unreachable. Tell your clients who it is. A backup nobody knows about is not a backup.
• Write the "if I'm unreachable" note. One page, kept in a shared document everyone relevant can open: who decides what, where the key files live, which accounts need attention, and what can wait. Make sure the important documents are available offline, because hotel wifi fails at exactly the wrong moment.

The honest objection is that some client work genuinely needs you live. A negotiation, a difficult conversation, a board meeting, a deal in its final days. Writing does not replace those, and it shouldn't try to.

So protect them. Put those slots in the diary first, at a time that works for the client, and treat them as fixed. Then say no to the calls that could have been an email. Protected, the important hour gets your best attention. Unprotected, it gets whatever is left after the fifteenth message.

Automattic runs on writing, not on meetings

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, has been built by Matt Mullenweg as a fully distributed company for most of its history. By 2019, when Mullenweg spoke to the company's Distributed.blog, it had around nine hundred people working across many countries and time zones.

The company's creed includes a commitment to "communicate as much as possible because it's the oxygen of a distributed company." In that same 2019 conversation, Mullenweg questioned why debate needed to happen in real time at all, when people could consider the information and write a deliberate reply.

The mechanism is an internal blogging system called P2. Teams post updates and decisions there instead of sending email or calling a meeting, and everything is archived and searchable. In a 2009 post on his own blog, Mullenweg noted that he was on the road a lot, and sometimes his only link to the company was checking P2 on his phone.

It would be convenient to credit the software. The software was the least of it. Automattic did not become a working distributed company because it had a clever tool — it worked because people were expected to write things down, in a place others could find them, before anyone asked.

The tool made writing easy. The habit made the company run.

Why I do it this way

I work like this, and I have for years.

My work runs across Australia, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, in English and Mandarin. On any given day, some of the people I work with are starting their morning while others are finishing dinner. There is no single working day to be available in.

So I decide the week's live slots before the flight, not after landing. Clients get written updates on a rhythm they can predict, and they know who to call if they cannot reach me. The things that need me in the room get me in the room, properly prepared.

Everything else waits for the window we agreed. A reply that takes a few hours rarely costs a relationship. A tired answer sent at midnight can.

Start here this week

Before Thursday, write your one-page "if I'm unreachable" note. Name the person who can act, list what they can decide without you, and put it in a shared document they can open offline.

Then send it to that person and ask them one question: what is missing? Their answer will show you exactly where the business still depends on you being awake.