Distributed teams are usually planned around where talent is available. The spread of time zones that results determines what kinds of work the team can realistically do.
Overlap is the binding resource
Two people in adjacent time zones share most of a working day. Two people on opposite sides of the world may share no ordinary working hours at all.
Everything requiring simultaneous attention, negotiation, joint problem solving, difficult conversations, has to fit inside whatever overlap exists.
Where the overlap is an hour, that hour becomes contested by every meeting the team needs, and it is consumed before individual work receives any of it.
Some work does not decompose
Tasks that can be specified precisely and handed over survive distribution well, because the handover carries everything the receiver needs.
Work involving ambiguity, disagreement or rapid iteration does not decompose cleanly. Attempting it across a large gap produces long cycles of partial understanding.
Which is why distributed organisations tend to align teams so that closely coupled work sits within a single time band, and looser dependencies cross between bands.
The cost of a handover cycle
When a question must cross a gap, the answer arrives the following working day, and any follow-up question costs another day.
A short exchange that would take fifteen minutes in one location can therefore take most of a week, and the elapsed time is invisible in any measure of effort.
Teams frequently underestimate this because each individual response feels prompt. The delay accumulates in the gaps rather than in anyone's working time.
The burden of shifted hours is unequal
Meetings scheduled inside a narrow overlap fall outside normal hours for someone, and in practice the same people usually absorb it repeatedly.
Where that person is more junior, or in a smaller regional office, the pattern becomes structural and contributes to attrition that is attributed to other causes.
Rotating inconvenient times distributes the cost, though it does not remove it, and it requires deliberate scheduling rather than allowing habit to settle.
Follow-the-sun is harder than it appears
Passing work continuously between regions is often presented as the advantage of wide distribution, and it depends on handovers being genuinely complete.
Where they are not, each region spends its first hours reconstructing what happened and its last hours documenting, which consumes much of the theoretical gain.
It works reliably for well-defined, repeatable processes such as monitoring and support, and much less reliably for open-ended work with shifting requirements.