Tracking hours when your client is eleven time zones away
· 6 min read
Working with a client on the other side of the world does something specific to a day. It does not make it longer, exactly. It breaks it into pieces, with a block early or late that exists only because of the overlap, and a middle that belongs to you.
That shape is worth measuring, because two things hide in it: unpaid hours that feel like work, and a genuine advantage that most people never quantify.
What the record shows
The obvious finding is the shape. A day with a distant client typically has three parts: work before the overlap, the overlap itself, and work after. The overlap is where meetings and immediate correspondence live. The rest is where the actual work happens.
The less obvious finding is how much of the overlap block is unbillable. Waiting for a call that starts late. The twenty minutes before it, when starting anything substantial is pointless. The message that arrives at the very end of their day and needs an answer before yours ends.
That is real time, and it does not appear on any invoice. Across a month it is substantial, and it is invisible without a record because it consists of small pieces.
The advantage, which is worth naming
The compensating finding is usually that the middle of the day is exceptionally productive.
When a client is asleep, nothing arrives. No messages, no calls, no requests that break a stretch of work. For anyone doing work that needs sustained attention, that is the most valuable condition available, and a distant client supplies it as a side effect.
Measuring makes this visible, and it changes how you think about the arrangement. The overlap costs you unbillable time; the silence buys you focused time. Whether the trade is good depends on the numbers, and you can have them.
Measuring deep work without a stopwatch covers looking at that specifically.
The failure mode to watch
The genuine risk in this arrangement is that the day quietly extends at both ends.
It happens gradually. An early call becomes a routine early start, without the evening moving to compensate. A late message becomes a habit of checking after dinner. Neither feels like a decision, and after a few months the working day is ten hours with a gap in the middle rather than eight.
This is the thing a record catches that memory does not. The first block and the last are separated by hours, so they are remembered as separate days rather than as one long one. The total is the number that tells you what is happening.
Overtime you did not notice covers the general version, and why remote work needs a closing time covers the fix.
Practical arrangements
Fix the overlap rather than leaving it open. An agreed window, say two hours, is better for both sides than an expectation of general availability. Availability without boundaries expands.
Batch the correspondence. Answering messages once at the start of the overlap and once at the end is far cheaper than responding as they arrive, and no worse for the client, who is asleep for most of the difference.
Decide what the overlap is for. Calls and decisions that genuinely need both people. Anything that can be written should be written, because writing works across time zones and calls do not.
Count the waiting. If a call routinely starts fifteen minutes late, that is an hour a week. Either it goes in the fee or the pattern gets raised.
Billing across time zones
Two practical notes.
Agree which day a piece of work belongs to. If you work at 22:00 your time and it is already tomorrow for the client, an invoice organised by date can look wrong to them. Pick one convention, say it explicitly, and use it consistently.
Record in your own local time and convert for presentation. Recording in the client’s time to be helpful produces confusion later, when you are reconciling against your own calendar.
Where Punchcard fits
Punchcard records the frontmost application by name, subtracts idle time, and prints a receipt at the closing time you set, in your local time.
For a fragmented day the useful property is that it does not care about the fragmentation. It records what happened when it happened, so an early block and a late block both appear on the same day’s receipt, and the total is the total. That is precisely the number that makes a creeping ten-hour day visible.
Set the closing time at the end of your intended day rather than at the end of the overlap. A receipt that prints when you meant to stop, and shows work after it, is telling you something useful. Setting a closing time and keeping it covers choosing one.
What it will not do is split time by client or by time zone. There are no projects or tags; that allocation is a daily step you do with the receipt in front of you.
Questions
I work across three time zones with different clients. Then the overlap blocks stack, and the risk of an extended day is higher. The measurement matters more, not less. Consider whether all three need live overlap or whether some can be entirely asynchronous.
Should I charge more for antisocial hours? Many people do, and it is a reasonable position when the hours are genuinely outside a normal working day. Measure first so the case is about a specific number of hours rather than a general grievance.
My record shows a huge day but it did not feel like one. That is the point. A day split by an eight-hour gap does not feel like one day, and the total is what tells you it was.
Does travel across time zones confuse the record? The Mac follows the system clock, so a record continues correctly through a time zone change. A day of travel will look unusual because it was.