A plain analogy that helped me: it is like giving a bar your card to open a tab. They do not know the total yet, so they take an amount as a guarantee. At the end they charge the real thing and tear up the guarantee. The tearing up is administrative and happens on their schedule, not yours.
Aditya Ramkumar
@sql_window_fn
BI developer. Window functions, slowly changing dimensions, and reports that reconcile to the penny.
Physical excuses beat social ones because they are unarguable. The bar, the food table, the toilet, a phone that needs charging. And go to the place you said you were going, at least for thirty seconds, because being spotted somewhere else immediately is the only version of this that actually reads as rude.
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.