A developer in India can work well with a business almost anywhere. The time difference is not the problem. An unplanned time difference is. When nobody has agreed when to overlap, how to hand work over or what counts as an update, a one-line question can cost a full day. A few simple habits fix most of it.
Know your overlap window
India runs on a single time zone, IST, which is UTC+5:30 and does not change for daylight saving. Your side may shift during the year, so check the overlap in both seasons.
- Gulf: the difference is small, so most of the working day overlaps.
- UK and Europe: India is a few hours ahead. Your morning is the developer's afternoon, which gives a comfortable overlap.
- Australia: the east coast is several hours ahead of India. The developer's morning overlaps with your afternoon.
- US: the gap is large. Overlap usually means the developer's evening and your morning, or an early start on one side.
Agree a fixed overlap of one or two hours for calls and quick decisions. Protect it. Everything else can happen asynchronously. If the natural overlap is awkward, agree who shifts their hours and by how much. Make it explicit, write it down, and review it after the first month.
Make async updates the default
With a large gap, the developer finishes their day while you are asleep or just starting yours. That can be an advantage: work moves forward overnight. It only works if updates are written so you can act on them without a call.
Ask for a short end-of-day note in the same format each time:
- What was done today, with links
- What is planned next
- What is blocked, and what decision is needed from you
The last line matters most. Answer blocking questions first thing in your day, so the developer can act on them at the start of theirs. A slow answer to a blocking question costs a whole cycle.
Use demos, not status meetings
Status meetings across time zones are expensive and rarely tell you much. A short demo does. Once a week, in the overlap window, ask the developer to show working software: a screen share, a staging link or a short recorded video.
Recorded walkthroughs are especially useful when overlap is thin. You watch in your own morning, reply with comments, and nobody stays up late. Seeing the work regularly also catches misunderstandings while they are still cheap to fix. End each demo by agreeing the next priorities, so the developer knows exactly what to work on while you are offline.
Plan around holidays on both sides
Indian public holidays differ from yours, and some vary by state. Major festivals such as Diwali and Holi move each year with the lunar calendar. National days such as Republic Day on 26 January and Independence Day on 15 August are fixed.
At the start of each quarter, share both holiday calendars and put them in the project tracker. Do the same for your own team's leave. It avoids a launch planned for the one day the person who can deploy is off. Your own side matters too: bank holidays and summer leave can leave a developer waiting days for an approval.
Written specs and the right tools
When you cannot tap someone on the shoulder, the written spec does the work. Write down what you want, what done looks like and any examples before the task starts. Our guide on how to write a developer brief covers the basics, and the same approach works for individual tasks.
Keep the toolset small and agreed:
- A project tracker for tasks, with one owner per task
- Chat for quick questions, with an agreed reply time
- A shared repository and staging site so you can see progress yourself
- A screen recording tool for demos and bug reports
Record decisions made on calls in the tracker, so the other side has them in writing.
Getting started across time zones
In the first week, agree three things: the overlap hours, the daily update format and the weekly demo slot. Our guide to onboarding a remote developer covers the rest of that first week. If the work is ongoing, a dedicated developer on a monthly plan keeps the same person working to your rhythm. See how it works to get started.
Tell us what you are building. We reply by email, usually the same working day.
