"And you really feel, if you live in New York, that you're three hours ahead of [people in Los Angeles]—I mean that literally. It's like, Oh man, we gotta help these people! And the longer you stay there, the less ahead of them you get, and then you're one of them. No way, man. Not for me." - Bill Murray, GQ Magazine, July 18, 2010
Working in New York City for most of my 20s and 30s, the office attained critical mass from about 10am to 6pm. When I moved out to Los Angeles, I found people in the office much earlier (before 8am!), but by about 3pm I'd usually have the office to myself. The company's NYC headquarters set the rhythm of the day.
Alone in the LA office in the late afternoon I had the distinct feeling that I might be just about the only person in the world at work at that moment.
I recently stumbled upon this chart, which reveals that my suspicion was essentially correct. Mapping the world's population against a typical 9-5 workday, 3pm in LA is the dead of night, economically speaking.
And while NYC feels like the center of the universe, it's not all that different from LA. There's a nice handoff from Europe to the US as New Yorkers arrive at work, but the vast majority of the world's work is complete by noon NYC time.
I'd like to imagine Silicon Valley invented the microchip and everything that came after because its workers were left alone as New Yorkers hit the bar, Tokyoites ate breakfast, and the rest of the world slept.
Today, I live in Tucson. The rhythms here are more local: the ebb and flow of daily traffic, the university calendar, the summer heat and monsoon.
I thought that chart might be better visualized on a map, and tried using the new Claude Design tool. Here, watch the sun sweep across the world as a wave of worker productivity.