'pends on the timezone. It is easy in finance to live in NY and work London or vice versa. Working London from SF though looks to be a lot harder. To work Singapore or Hong Kong from NY would be a stressful lifestyle.

I started working at wordpress.com (Automattic) in 2006. Everyone was remote.

I was in the UK, a colleague was in Eire and everyone else the US. The colleague was (still is) a coder, I did user support. Communication was IRC. The effect for me was that I'd do my full day then stay online as the US folks started theirs. 15+hr days became the norm (I moved into tackling spam as well as user help) and on more than one occasion I'd just work through the night. ENTIRELY up to me, zero pressure, not even implied. I just like to stay on top of things.

Motivation? I was hired to do a job, so I did it.

At the time I imbibed a lot of caffeine but that was as much as addiction as anything else. Kicked that habit before I left.

It took some years but teams were eventually set by timezone +/- a few hours which was good.

Never work with teams to the west because they will always schedule meetings for what they think is mid-morning and it's lunchtime where you are.

The last time I worked on a team with members in different time zones (very different -- half the team was in the US, half in India), the only thing it realistically affected was meetings. Since we were essentially 12 hours apart, there was no way to schedule meetings so that they were convenient for everybody. What we did was to alternate who had to have the meeting at the weirdo time. Spread the pain and all that.

I've done this as a short term contract (freelance). One was 12 timezones different. We found about an hour a day to overlap and tried to be efficient with that time. Most of our communication was async (and naturally would have been for the type of work, even if I was local) so we didn't always need the full time.

It disrupted my sleep cycle, which was tougher than I expected. I'm always up late, but working late is different. The project was exciting, so motivation wasn't an issue.

I'd do it again, for the right project. But I personally wouldn't want to do anything more synchronous than an hour a day.

I have worked with testers 9 hours off my schedule.

That worked out very nicely. We developed during the day, sent out a mail with test instructions, went home, and had a mail message with test results in the morning. So, it felt like you never had to wait for test results.

9 hours also isn’t too large a difference for the occasional phone meeting (one side would take the call from home, either before coming to work, or after getting home, and would take compensation time typically on the same day).

It does require people in both teams who can write clearly, though.

3 years working with people in a very different timezone. It can be a curse or a blessing and it all depends on the project / people.

Schedule wise, I do some regular evening hours (2 / week) to catchup - that can be a real problem sleep wise. If you finish your calls late in the evening, especially the ones where you are the one doing the talking and presenting things, it's very hard to go to sleep straight after that. You need to add at least 1h of winding down time.

As for motivation, from my experience, when I'm working on something I really like, I'm 10x more efficient that I would be in the office. When you start in the morning, you know that for a long period there will be nobody to interrupt you and you get a LOT more done.

The opposite is similar though - when I'm not motivated by a project, it's insanely hard to motivate myself. But maybe it's a sign that the project shouldn't be done in the first place.