my day starts around 4pm.
i wake up in the late afternoon, and i work through the night, and i go to sleep somewhere around when everyone else in surat is leaving for the office. that is not a phase i am in. it is how the last several years have gone.
the reason is arithmetic. most of my clients are in the us and the uk. their morning is my night. if you want to be the person who is available when something breaks, and available in the same hour they noticed it broke, you move your life onto their clock.
what it buys
the honest answer is money and access.
the rate difference between a client in india and a client in the us is not small, and the gap is not about skill. it is about which economy your invoice lands in. being awake for their standup is one of the very few things i control that closes that gap.
it also buys a specific kind of trust. infrastructure work is bought on the belief that you will pick up. a deploy fails at 10am in new york and either you answer or you are a vendor they are already thinking about replacing.
so it works. i am not going to write a post about how i have discovered that hustle is a lie. the trade is real and it paid for everything on this site.
what it costs
nobody in my life is on this schedule.
that is the whole cost, and it does not sound like much written down. it means dinner happens at a table i am not at. it means the friend who wants to catch up is free on a saturday afternoon, which is my 6am. it means family events happen on a few hours of sleep, and i am there but i am not really there.
there is also a slower thing. daylight. i can go days barely seeing any, and the effect on how you feel is not dramatic, it is just a low flat grey that you stop noticing because it is the only setting you have.
and the boundary disappears. when your work hours are the middle of the night, there is no natural end to the day. nobody is leaving the office around you. no restaurant closing, no last train, no signal at all except your own decision to stop, and that decision gets worse the more tired you are.
what i actually changed
not the schedule. i tried flipping to a normal one twice and both times a client emergency landed at 2am and i was awake for it anyway, which is the worst of both.
what i changed is smaller.
i stopped pretending the day was free. if i am awake at 4pm and working until 6am, that is a full day, and treating the afternoon as bonus time i can also fill with meetings just meant fourteen hour days.
i made two hours a week non negotiable in daylight. not for productivity. for the plain physical fact of it.
i stopped being available in both timezones. for a long time i answered indian clients during my afternoon and us clients through my night, which is not a schedule, it is two jobs.
i started saying the schedule out loud to clients. it turns out most of them do not need you awake at 3am, they need to know exactly when you will reply. an honest window beats a fake always.
would i recommend it
no, not as a lifestyle. as a phase with a specific purpose, yes.
it is worth being clear eyed about what it is: you are trading the part of your life that overlaps with other people for a better rate. that is a rational trade when you are building something and a bad one to still be making in ten years without noticing you never chose it again.
i am still on it. i think about that last sentence more than i used to.