When ‘now’ means different things on each side of the call

There is a phrase that became a kind of shorthand during the pandemic years, when every meeting moved online and every delegation that used to fly into London started joining from a screen instead.

‘Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, whatever applies to you.’

I heard it dozens of times, opening dozens of virtual sessions between British and Latin American counterparts. Everyone laughed, every time. It became a ritual acknowledgement of the obvious: we are not in the same time.

What nobody said out loud — and what I watched cause friction in meeting after meeting — is that the time zone gap is only the surface of the problem.

The situation

Before the pandemic, the delegations I interpreted for would fly to London. They would arrive, adjust, and exist in the same space and time as their British counterparts. Eight in the morning meant eight in the morning for everyone. The shared ‘now’ was given.

When meetings moved online, the shared ‘now’ disappeared. A British official joining a call at nine in the morning is fresh, caffeinated, at the start of their working day. Their counterpart in Mexico City is joining the same call at three in the morning, or in Buenos Aires at six in the morning, or in Bogotá at four. The word ‘now’, as in ‘let’s discuss this now’, ‘we need a decision now’, ‘can you send that now’, no longer points to the same moment for everyone in the room.

Linguists call this deixis: the way words like ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘soon’, and ‘later’ only have meaning relative to the speaker’s position in time and space. When everyone is in the same room, deixis is invisible. When the room is virtual and spans five time zones, deixis starts to fail.

The friction

The time zone problem is the obvious one and most professionals have learned to manage it. What is less obvious, and what the Slot System was partly built to address, is the deeper temporal friction that exists even when everyone is physically in the same city.

British professional culture operates on a Slot logic: time is structured, segmented, and treated as a finite resource to be allocated carefully. ‘Soon’ means a specific window. ‘Let’s circle back’ means a meeting in the diary within days. A deadline is a Slot in someone’s calendar, not a general orientation toward the future.

LatAm professional culture operates on a Flow logic: time is relational, contextual, and shaped by the quality of the interaction rather than its duration. ‘Soon’ means when the moment is right. ‘Let’s stay in touch’ is a genuine expression of intent, not a commitment to a specific date. A deadline is a direction of travel, not a hard boundary.

Neither is careless. Neither is unprofessional. They are two entirely different architectures for how time works; and when they meet without either side knowing it, the friction is invisible and the cost is real.

Slot v. Flow in action

The fix is not to impose one logic on the other. It is to make the shared ‘now’ explicit before you leave the room.

When a British professional says ‘let’s follow up soon’ and means Tuesday, they need to say Tuesday. When a LatAm counterpart says ‘we will confirm shortly’ and means when we have internal alignment, the British professional needs to know that ‘shortly’ is not a calendar commitment but a relational one and that pressing for a date before that alignment exists will not accelerate the process, it will damage it.

The question to ask before any British-LatAm meeting closes is not ‘are we agreed?’ but ‘do we mean the same thing by ‘now’?’ It sounds almost too simple. The meetings that stall, the follow-ups that disappear, the deals that expire quietly... most of them had their answer in that question.

Over to you

In your last British-LatAm meeting, did you leave with a shared ‘now’: a specific date, owner, and next step that meant the same thing to everyone in the room?

Until next Tuesday,

Cecilia

Founder, Multilateral Studio  ·  Author, Slot v Flow