Distributed teams fail on time zones more than on anything else. The problems are predictable and largely solvable with habits rather than tools.
Know your overlap
The hours when everyone is available is the scarcest resource on a distributed team. Using it for status updates that could be written is the most common waste.
Overlap is for discussion, decisions and disagreement. Everything else goes in writing.
Write more than feels necessary
In a distributed team, a question asked without context costs a full day – you ask, they wake up, they ask for clarification, you are asleep.
The habit that fixes this is writing the question with everything needed to answer it, including what you have already tried and what you will do if the answer is one thing or another.
Default to written decisions
A decision made in a call, unrecorded, does not exist for the people who were asleep. Writing it down with the reasoning is what lets others proceed without asking.
Be explicit about your hours
Publish when you are available and respect other people’s. The expectation of instant response destroys the main advantage of distributed work.
Scheduled send exists for exactly this – write when it suits you, deliver when it suits them.
Rotate the inconvenience
If a meeting must include everyone, the person taking it at an antisocial hour should rotate. Teams where the same person always takes the bad slot lose that person.
The honest limit
Beyond about eight hours of difference, real-time collaboration stops being practical and the work has to be structured for it. That is a constraint to design around, not to push through.