The 10pm Tax. Nobody Told Me About The Timezones.

It's 10pm.

I am at the laptop.

Not because I planned to be here at 10pm. Not because I am one of those people who works better at night, I am not one of those people, I am a person who is tired at 10pm and would prefer to be somewhere else. I am here because the client in New York just got to his desk, which is 9am his time, which is 10pm mine, which is the overlap. The window. The forty-five minutes where we are both awake and available and the work can actually happen.

This is the timezone tax. It is invisible in the content. It does not appear in the cost of living breakdown. It is not mentioned in the visa application process. It arrives quietly, about three months in, and then it never leaves.

I had a call scheduled for 9am once. An important one — the kind where you prepare, where you have notes, where you have slept adequately and made the good coffee and positioned yourself in the chair that has the right light for the camera.

9am my time. Which I had confirmed twice.

What I had not confirmed was which 9am. My 9am or their 9am.

Their 9am was my 11pm.

I found this out at 8:45pm when the calendar notification arrived and the stomach dropped in the specific way it drops when something administrative has gone wrong and there is no longer time to fix it.

I made the call. 11pm. Da Lat. The city was dark and the coffee was wrong and I was wearing a presentable shirt over what were very much not presentable trousers and the client on the other end was fresh and caffeinated and ready and I was performing alertness with the desperation of someone performing alertness at 11pm.

The call went fine. It always goes fine. That's the thing about performing alertness, you can sustain it for an hour if you have to, if the invoice depends on it, if the alternative is rescheduling something that took three weeks to schedule.

But fine at 11pm after a full day is a different thing from fine at 9am with the right coffee and the actual energy.

The client didn't know the difference. The invoice was the same either way.

But I knew.

Here is what the remote work content machine shows you: a person with a laptop in a beautiful location, working when they want, stopping when they want, the day structured entirely around their own preferences and rhythms.

Here is what the timezone tax actually looks like.

The client in New York starts his day at 9am EST. That is 9pm in Vietnam. If you want synchronous communication, which clients generally do, which the work generally requires, which no amount of async workflow tools completely eliminates, you are working at 9pm.

The contractor in Berlin finishes her day at 6pm CET. That is midnight in Vietnam. The supplier call that needs to happen before end of business in Europe happens at midnight in Asia.

The team meeting that everyone's calendar agreed on, the one where the algorithm found the time that worked for London, New York, and Sydne, works for London at 8am, New York at 3am, Sydney at 6pm, and Vietnam at 2pm, which is the only timezone in the meeting that actually got a reasonable slot and it is yours, which sounds like luck until you realize the 2pm slot only happened because you absorbed all the other bad slots in previous weeks.

The overlap, the window where the people who pay you and the people you pay and the people you coordinate with are all simultaneously available, is often a single narrow band of time each day. In my experience, working predominantly with European and American clients from Southeast Asia, that band is somewhere between 3pm and 7pm local time if I'm lucky, and 8pm to midnight if I'm not.

Some days I'm not lucky.

Not the hours. The hours are manageable. Eight hours of work is eight hours of work regardless of when they happen.

It's the rhythm.

The human body has a preferred operating window. Mine is roughly 7am to 3pm. This is when the thinking is clearest, the writing is cleanest, the decisions are most reliable. After 3pm the quality degrades gradually but measurably. After 9pm I am capable of completing tasks but not particularly capable of completing them well.

The timezone tax takes the work that needs the most quality, the client calls, the difficult decisions, the writing that requires full attention, and schedules it in the degraded window. Because that's when the overlap is. Because the client's 9am is my 10pm and the client's calendar doesn't know or care about my circadian rhythm.

I have tried going to bed late and waking up late, shifting my whole day to align with Western timezones. This works until it doesn't, until the body objects to the shift, until the city outside the window is doing its morning things while you are trying to sleep through them, until the disconnect between your schedule and the schedule of the place you're living in creates its own particular alienation.

I have tried taking American clients only, which simplifies the timezone problem by making it uniformly terrible, everything is late night, consistently, rather than unpredictably. This works better than it sounds. Consistency is its own form of rhythm, even when the rhythm is wrong.

I have tried the async approach, everything in writing, nothing in real time, the document replaces the call, the Loom video replaces the meeting. Some clients love this. Others tolerate it. A meaningful percentage will not work this way regardless of the efficiency argument because what they are actually buying, underneath the deliverable, is the relationship, and relationships are synchronous.

Nothing fully solves it. The timezone tax is structural. It is the price of being in the wrong timezone for the people who pay you, and if the people who pay you are in a timezone twelve hours away, some version of this tax is always due.

The 10pm call happens. I make it work. I have made presentable shirts over unpresentable trousers into a minor art form.

The late nights accumulate and I recover from them and they accumulate again. This is the cycle. It is not what the freedom formula advertised and it is the honest cost of the arbitrage, living cheaply in Southeast Asia while earning in Western currencies requires being available in Western time, at least partially, at least sometimes.

What I've stopped doing is pretending it isn't there.

The content machine pretends it isn't there. The freedom formula glosses over it. The cost of living breakdown leaves it out entirely because it isn't a financial cost, it's a physical one, and physical costs don't fit in a spreadsheet.

But it's there. Every nomad working across significant timezone distance is paying it. The ones who are still here have simply built it into the architecture of their days and made their peace with the 10pm laptop.

The ones who haven't are still surprised by it.

Don't be surprised by it.

It's 10pm in Da Lat. I have a call in four minutes.

The coffee is wrong but it will have to do.

Andrew - No Refunds •••