The Afternoon Shift

We set the clocks back last night here in Austin. Portugal did the same thing a week earlier.

For most people that is an extra hour of sleep and a microwave clock nobody fixes until March. For us it was a small reminder of something we have to get right about the move, and it has nothing to do with visas or bank accounts.

It is the clock.

Six hours, most of the year

Porto runs six hours ahead of Austin. For one week in the fall and two weeks in the spring the gap drops to five, because Europe and the US change their clocks on different Sundays. That is the week we just had, and it is the kind of detail that will bite somebody exactly once.

Caroline and I will both work with clients in the US from Porto. So I did the math on what a normal workday looks like from there.

• A client who starts at 8 in Austin: that is 2 in the afternoon in Porto.
• A 5 o'clock call in Austin: 11 at night in Porto.
• An East Coast client working 9 to 5: 2 in the afternoon to 10 at night.

A US workday, lived from Porto, is an afternoon and evening job.

The Afternoon Shift

Here is the part that matters most to us. Our clients should not feel this move at all.

We will keep serving them exactly the way we do now. Same hours on their side, same calls, same response times. Nobody is going to get an email asking them to move their Monday meeting because Will decided to live in Portugal. That was our choice, not theirs.

So the shift is ours. I am calling it The Afternoon Shift.

Mornings become ours. Coffee, a walk by the river, the market, Portuguese study (which sits on our plan and gets far less of my attention than it should). The client work starts after lunch, right about when our clients are starting their day, and runs into the evening.

Is there a catch? Sure. Porto comes alive in the evening, and dinner there happens later than any Texan is used to. Some nights a 5 o'clock call in Austin will be an 11 o'clock call for us, and we will take it, the same way we would take it today. I may be the only guy in Porto eating a late dinner and still grinning about his morning walk.

I have spent thirty years watching leaders make a big change and then quietly expect everyone around them to absorb it. Moving abroad is OUR big change. We absorb it.

The move changes our clock, not theirs.

Where the plan stands

The move is still on track for next fall, a little under a year out. Nothing urgent jumped off the plan this week, and that is exactly how I want it to feel at this distance.

If you are planning a move and keeping US clients or a US job, how much of the time difference are you willing to carry yourself? Leave a comment or just reply to this email.