Async Standups for Teams Across Asia's Time Zones
A designer in Bengaluru, a developer in Manila and a project lead in Singapore are all in "Asia", but they don't share a clock — and that's before a client in London or New York joins the thread. For a team like that, a daily video standup means someone is always early, late or asleep. A written one works for everyone.
The clock map, in one list
These are the standard offsets from UTC for the places small teams in Asia most often work from:
- UTC+5: Pakistan.
- UTC+5:30: India and Sri Lanka.
- UTC+5:45: Nepal.
- UTC+6: Bangladesh.
- UTC+7: Thailand, Vietnam, and western Indonesia (including Jakarta).
- UTC+8: Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
- UTC+9: South Korea and Japan.
Measured from India, Bangkok is 1½ hours ahead, Singapore and Manila are 2½ hours ahead, and Seoul and Tokyo are 3½ hours ahead. Those odd half-hours are the first thing that goes wrong.
Watch out for the half-hour offsets
India and Sri Lanka at UTC+5:30 and Nepal at UTC+5:45 are the offsets people miscalculate, usually by rounding to the nearest hour. The fix is boring and effective: always write a time with its zone, such as "10:00 IST" or "15:30 SGT", never just "10:00". If a deadline matters, put it on the ticket with the zone included.
Your clock stays put — your clients' clock doesn't
The places listed above don't observe daylight saving time. Most of your clients in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia do. So the overlap you carefully worked out in March quietly moves by an hour in spring and again in autumn, and a meeting that fit comfortably suddenly lands at dinner or at 6 a.m.
Some worked examples, so you can see the shape of it:
- Manila 16:00–18:00 is London 08:00–10:00 in winter, and 09:00–11:00 in summer.
- Bengaluru 13:30–17:30 is London 08:00–12:00 in winter, and 09:00–13:00 in summer.
- Bengaluru 20:00 is 09:30 in New York in winter and 10:30 in summer.
Put a reminder in your calendar for each clock change and re-check your shared hours when it comes around.
What a written standup looks like
Each person posts once per working day, at the start of their own day, in one agreed place. Three lines are enough:
- Done: what I finished since my last update.
- Next: what I'm doing today.
- Blocked: what I need, and from whom — named, not implied.
Point at tickets instead of restating them: "Done: homepage banner. Next: checkout copy. Blocked on the logo files from Priya." If your board is up to date, the standup becomes a thin layer on top of it rather than a second source of truth.
In Alignr you can mention a teammate by name in a ticket comment and they're notified, so "blocked on" becomes a specific request. Checklists inside a ticket let a bigger task show progress without being split into a dozen cards.
Find the shared window, then guard it
Asynchronous doesn't mean never talking. Work out the hours when most of the team is online — for example, a team split between Bengaluru and Singapore on ordinary 9-to-6 hours shares about six and a half hours — and keep that time for what is genuinely better live: kickoffs, tricky decisions, a retro that needs discussion. Everything else goes in writing.
Meet when you need a conversation. Write when you only need to inform.
Look back once a cycle
Daily updates keep work moving; a short retro at the end of each sprint keeps the process improving. The same three questions work whether your team chats on WhatsApp, LINE, Telegram or Slack — we cover a low-effort format in how to run a retro when everything lives on WhatsApp. New to sprints? Start with planning your first sprint in one afternoon. Working across Africa's zones instead? See the African version of this guide.
Boards and sprints work on Alignr's free plan (up to two users, one team, two boards). A larger team needs the Team plan at $2 per user per month, billed in USD. Alignr's interface is in English. Start free to try the routine with your team.