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Comment by eyelidlessness | Hacker News Reader

If you work asynchronously, it should be no problem to schedule your messages within the working hours of the recipient.

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I have many group slack, group text, and WhatsApp channels where I don’t even know the working hours of all the people in them.

I have other channels where I do know everyone and also know there is literally no overlap in natural working hours of all the recipients. My leadership team channel (as an example) has members in India, Switzerland, and both coasts of the US.

Okay so all you need to do to comply with this law is collect working hours.

How would that help? (Or maybe “what does that mean?”)

The net effect for some is likely to be “to ensure compliance, make sure to never employ someone from Portugal.” To the extent that is the outcome, Portuguese workers are harmed.

It just means respecting when your coworkers work and scheduling messages to them in those bounds. It’s not that complicated.

You have clearly never worked in a large geographically distributed group.

Can I ever send a slack message to my slack group: #foo-leadership or an email to the equivalent membered foo-leadership@bar.com d-list where all people on that team are working “normal” local hours and someone in that group is working in IST (UTC +5.5), someone else in CET (UTC +1), someone else in EST (UTC -5), and someone else in PST (UTC -8)?

It seems to me that I can’t, but perhaps you see a way that’s “not that complicated”?

And build a simple system that doesn't directly forward messages to each recipient outside their specific working hours. Thus, your colleagues halfway across the country may get your message immediately, but those halfway across the globe won't see it until they get to work again.

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