Moved from Brazil to Portugal and thought the timezone shift would be trivial. Instead my whole team is 4 hours behind and my "evenings" are meetings. How do you protect a normal life when your calendar belongs to another continent?
The “evenings are meetings” line is way too accurate.
Same team-timezone mismatch here. What actually helped was renegotiating which meetings genuinely needed me live versus which could just be async.
My clients are mostly on the US east coast, so my afternoons are quiet and my evenings are meetings, just like the original post describes. What finally helped me was two rules. No meetings after eight in the evening my time, ever, and one day a week with no calls at all, which I protect like a religion. I lost one client over it, and my relationship with Mateo improved enormously.
Protecting one call-free day is something I really need to start doing. Thank you, Lucía.
Emma's point about async is the one that changed things for me. Once I asked for a shared list of which meetings needed decisions and which were updates, half of my evening calls turned into written notes that I read in the morning. It took one awkward conversation with my manager and saved me hours every week.