Eleven hours difference, so their 9am is my 9pm. Three calls a week, plus they message during their afternoon which is the middle of my night. Six weeks in and I am sleeping badly and doing my best work at 2am because that is when the messages stop. I do not want to leave Asia. What do people do here that is not just white knuckling it for a year?
From the sleep side: keep your wake time fixed no matter what happened the night before. Everything else can move. An evening call is a bright screen plus adrenaline at the exact hour you want your body winding down, so cut the light after it, dim everything, no bright kitchen, and give yourself an hour before bed that is not a screen. If you have to shift your whole day, shift it by an hour at a time over a week rather than all at once.
Doing something physical between the call and bed helps me a lot. Twenty minutes of walking outside, even at 10pm.
Two structural options nobody mentions. Price it: an inconvenient schedule is a service and it can carry a premium, especially at renewal. Or move your base rather than your body clock, because Europe gives you five or six hours of overlap with the east coast and you can work daylight hours in both. If this client is a big share of your income, a season in Lisbon or Tbilisi solves the problem permanently instead of nightly.
This is why so many people working for US clients end up clustered in the same handful of European cities. It is not fashion, it is arithmetic.
Put your working hours in your calendar in their timezone so they can see the block, and set your chat status to something explicit. Half of the pressure to answer at 3am is imagined and disappears when the expectation is written down somewhere they can see.
@sql_window_fn · 10mo ago · 3 replies
Define an overlap window and defend it, rather than being reachable across their whole day.
Concretely: tell them you are online 8pm to 11pm your time, which is 9am to noon theirs, and that is when calls and live questions happen. Outside that you reply in the morning your time, which lands on their evening. Written down in one message, once, in a friendly tone. Almost every client accepts this because they mostly want predictability rather than immediacy.
Then move as much as you can out of calls. A five minute screen recording with your voice over it replaces most status meetings and it plays at their convenience. Batch the calls onto two days rather than three, so you get three clean evenings.
Last thing, and it is the one that fixed my sleep: do not work after the call. The call is the end of the day, not the middle of it. Working until 2am because you are wired afterwards is what actually breaks people.
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@circadian_cass · 10mo ago
The do not work after the call rule is the important one. A 9pm call ending at 10 is survivable indefinitely. A 9pm call that turns into a 1am work session is not.
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@rack_unit_12 · 10mo ago
Sent the overlap message. They replied fine with that in eleven minutes, which is annoying given I spent six weeks not asking.
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