The Woes of Time Differences
These days most of my regular job is teaching at my school. I say most because I still make money from photography and translation jobs, but teaching has gradually become the main thing. I suppose I should have expected that when I started my own school.
My teaching work has followed current trends. That is to say, when COVID happened, a lot of my classes moved online. An interesting consequence of that is that I started taking on students from other places in Japan, sometimes pretty far away: for example, I have two current students who live in Hokkaido, which is several hours away from where I am.
All of Japan is on the same time zone, so it's all well and good and not confusing. Maybe you can see where I'm going with this. During COVID I soon found myself taking on students outside of Japan. At first this was mostly from Korea and Taiwan. These are only an hour different from Japan, so it's not too difficult to figure out. But it wasn't long before I expanded from here and found students in India and Bangladesh (yes, they speak English in those countries as a second language, but they wanted specific training help from me). I then had a student who works at Nissan be transferred to the US (to Michigan) for three years and he asked to continue my lessons. I agreed. This opened the door to teaching other Japanese students who were currently working for a year or two in America, and that's a mess of time-zones right there (four of them!).
You know, in the past few years I've done pretty good keeping all these time-zone straight on my schedule, but I was bound to mess up eventually. I made a contract with a Brazilian family currently living in Texas, but somehow for my availability I converted wrong and told them times I am busy and/or asleep. So yeah, now I'm trying to work that out with them. I don't speak any Portuguese and their English is terrible (hence why they hired me), which just adds to the scheduling problems.
Whew...
The internet is amazing, don't get me wrong. And the ability to work remotely is great. But dealing with multiple time-zones can really be a headache...
Have any of you had to deal with time zone scheduling problems like this?
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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon. |
Oops. It was bound to happen. I’m sure you will rectify it.
Already did. I think though this is why people need secretaries. It's a headache I'd rather not spend my braincells trying to deal with.
Being in UK now, I can work out the time zones much easier compared to when I was working in Hong Kong. Asia is roughly 8 hours ahead of me, and US West coast 5 (?) hours behind me. The difficult is when I need to work out the specifics, particularly with USA having different time zones, having rubbish geography doesn't help! Then there's daylight saving time, who's changed and who hasn't? Another confusion. By the time I've sorted it out, they've changed again!!!
Yeah, DST is the worst! I have to figure out who changes and who doesn't, then when they change! It makes it worse that Japan doesn't follow DST but most Western countries do, which just adds to my confusion. The sooner I can get an AI secretary that can handle this for me, the better!
The Ying and the yang. How do
You yea h lessons Online? Through a company or did you set up your own business and site?
I do have a company that sources me some of these students, but many of them are students I met here and contracted myself at my school, then they moved but remained students.
Oh wow, I can only imagine how big of a headache that must be!
One of the draw backs to remote work that no one ever talks about...
Fortunately not yet, since working online is not feasible in my line of work. Btw, shout if you need any help with the portuguese translations 😉
Thanks for the offer! I managed to work it out with the couple I mentioned above, but I'll keep you in mind if any more problems arise.
Working with time zone is a nightmare... Used to import some stuff produced in Taiwan but the time difference was a constant headache. I agree with you completely. A giant headache!
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Interesting post! I love these images very much. I am so happy that you have students in Hokkaido! They need nice teachers like you;) Japan is lucky not to have a different time zone. However, I sometimes wished for a different time zone living in Hokkaido, especially in winter. However, I don't want to be confused by time differences.
Here in Canada, we have time zones, as you know. Yes, it's confusing sometimes, but I've gotten used to it. I take some online courses to study at a Japanese school sometimes. I like to have night classes because it's morning here. I also have online students for my work. I feel very comfortable working from home. Sometimes, I work as peer support for Japanese people when they need to talk at night. Since my time is in the mornings, it works well for us.
I really want us to have many working options like a digital nomad without dealing with time confusion! I want to have Doraemon's Dokodemo door so I don't get confused by time. Wait a minute, we still have time differences using the Dokodemo door..
Just like when classes were mostly made online, people were facing problems because some kids were reluctant to take physical classes.
That is a tricky situation but I think one that we will likely work with at increasing rates. My company has development staff in India, as many tech companies do, so I’m already more familiar with that big difference in times than I ever was before. It’s remarkable though and really cool to be able to do these things like that.
Hopefully the family is good about the confusion and working with you to get it at the right times.