· 5 min read
Working European hours from Morocco
The single most common objection to working abroad is the calendar. In Morocco's case, the calendar is the argument in favour.
Distance is usually the wrong thing to measure. What decides whether remote work abroad is workable is not how far away you are, but how far your working day has drifted from everyone else's.
The arithmetic
Morocco observes UTC+1 throughout the year. Central Europe is UTC+1 in winter and UTC+2 in summer. So for roughly half the year you are on the same clock as Berlin, Vienna or Zurich, and for the other half you are one hour behind.
One hour behind is not a burden — for a lot of people it is an improvement. Your morning starts before the first meeting lands. The gap between waking up and being interrupted gets longer, which is usually where the day's real work fits.
The one exception to plan around
Morocco moves its clocks back to UTC+0 for the month of Ramadan, then returns to UTC+1 afterwards. During that period you would be one hour behind Central Europe in winter, or two in summer. The dates shift each year with the lunar calendar, so check them when choosing travel dates.
Practical habits that make it invisible
Set your calendar to show two time zones for the trip. Tell your team the dates and, more usefully, tell them nothing will change — the announcement people actually need is the reassuring one. Keep your standing meetings exactly where they are, and resist the temptation to schedule around a lifestyle you have not lived yet.
What genuinely changes
Not the hours. The end of them. Finishing work in Central Europe in February means finishing in the dark. Finishing work in Marrakech means the most interesting part of the day is still ahead of you.
That is the whole proposition, and it survives scrutiny precisely because it does not ask your job to bend.