Time zone gymnastics with a home team/family — how do you protect your sanity?

The people I've seen manage this well long-term tend to do one specific thing: negotiate a small, fixed, non-negotiable window (say, two mornings a week) for early calls, rather than leaving it open-ended and reactive to whoever schedules a meeting. Open-ended is what actually burns people out — a bounded, predictable cost is much easier to live with, even if the total hours are similar.

Set a hard cutoff time for calls and just started saying no past it. Took a while to feel like I was actually allowed to, but it’s protected my evenings a lot since.

Gentle pushback on the hard-cutoff approach — not realistic for everyone depending on role or seniority. I’ve had to settle for a partial compromise instead of a clean line, and that’s okay too.

Same struggle, my evenings basically don’t exist some weeks.

Following, currently negotiating this exact thing with my manager.

Does anyone actually get their home team to shift meeting times at all, or does the remote person always end up absorbing it?

Partial answer to Hiroshi — got exactly one recurring meeting moved after asking directly. Most others didn’t budge, but that one was worth the ask.