12 years ago I created my first company and ever since then I have had to deal with time differences.
I live in Israel and my clients have always been mostly in the US, Europe and Asia.

In my early days doing business online I was up half the night personally handing client concerns – many of the clients didn’t even know I was overseas. Thanks Vonage!

Now, 12 years later, Five Blocks is a company with more than 20 employees – most of whom are in Israel at any given time.

We have started traveling a lot more than before. In the past year I was in the US at least 10 times, as well as business trips to Puerto Rico, Moscow, Zurich, London, Singapore, Hong Kong and Baku.

Often I am asked about the time difference – isn’t it hard to work with people when they are 7 hours behind or 5 houris ahead?
Lately we have gotten into a groove that works extremely well.

We are GMT+2 so working with Europe is easy. New York, Boston and Washington – where more than half of our clients are located – is 7 hours behind. We try  to do our calls with them from 9-11AM (4-6Pm for us). This gives us all day to work without getting too many emails or phone calls from those clients.

Hong Kong and Singapore are 5 hours ahead of us – making morning calls work really well for us – it’s mid afternoon for our clients and partners in Asia.

The time difference forces us to schedule our calls at the beginning and end of the day leaving a big chunk of time for getting the work done – with far less distractions!

Turning a disadvantage into an advantage – that’s Antifragile!