Email, sms, voice can cope with crisis that arise. In a small office face is important; less important in an environment that's geographically distributed.
Very little communication I have around the office are crises - but they are important. If I insisted on having a completely different schedule from my coworkers, I'd either be impeding their work, or subjecting myself to emails, SMSes, calls, etc, outside of my work hours.
Lots of company have flex time so people can choose their hours but have some overlap for communications. This is also where the "mid day meeting rush" comes from that exacerbates the situation.
This. The medium of communication really depends on the type of content and it's priority.
High priority: call me or use some other synchronous communications protocol.
Everything else: email, ticket please. Async is better.
I'm used to working in geographically separated teams in different timezones, so starting my day 2 hours ahead of everyone else is no different than me working in a different timezone. Once you solve this problem, you have solved the majority of your communication difficulties.
It's no different than being out to lunch. You're 20 minutes away from the office in your scenario, and hopefully you're not the only person who can fix things. No one should be the company savior, and if you can't leave the office, you have bigger issues than working different schedules.
