I spent four months in Bangkok working for a company based in London, and the thing that nearly broke me was not the heat, the food, the loneliness, or the bureaucracy. It was the clocks.
Being six or seven hours ahead sounds manageable on paper. In practice it meant my working day started in the mid-afternoon and often ran past midnight. I ate dinner at my desk. I missed every social plan that started after six. By the time the London office signed off, I was wired and restless and the city outside had already gone quiet.
Nobody had warned me about this, and I could not find a single honest account of it online. Everything I read was either "time zones are easy, just be disciplined" or "work from anywhere is freedom." Neither of those helped at 11 p.m. on a Wednesday when I was still in a standup meeting and my flatmate was asleep.
The time-zone math people skip
Most remote workers pick their destination based on weather, cost of living, visa rules, and vibes. Time zones get about thirty seconds of thought, usually along the lines of "it is only X hours, I will manage."
The problem is not the hours themselves. It is what those hours do to the rest of your day.
If you are in Bangkok working London hours, a 9 a.m. start in London is 3 or 4 p.m. your time depending on the season. A meeting at 2 p.m. their time is 8 or 9 p.m. yours. A "quick end-of-day sync" at 5 p.m. becomes 11 p.m. or midnight. And those are the scheduled hours. The unscheduled Slack messages, the urgent threads, the "can you jump on a call" moments, those bleed further.
Being behind is different. If you are in Mexico City working for a London company, you are six hours behind for part of the year and seven when the UK is on summer time. The team's day starts while you are still asleep. By the time you open your laptop, half the decisions have been made. You spend the first hour catching up on threads that moved without you. That feeling of perpetually arriving late never fully goes away.
What it does to your week
The damage is not dramatic. It is wearing. You do not collapse. You just stop doing, one by one, the things that usually keep you sane.
In Bangkok, I stopped going to the gym because my afternoons were consumed by work. I stopped cooking because dinner happened during meetings. I stopped meeting people in the evenings because "the evening" was my core working window.
After two months I was sleeping from about 1 a.m. to 9 a.m., eating badly, and spending most of my daylight hours in a foggy half-productive state because my real energy was reserved for the overlap window with London.
I spoke to other remote workers who had dealt with the same thing. Most of them described it in nearly identical terms. Not burnout exactly. More like a slow drift away from a normal life, replaced by a schedule that served the company but did not serve you.
Where the schedule starts to work
After Bangkok, I tried Lisbon while working with a team split between London and the US East Coast. Relative to London, Lisbon matched London. Relative to the US East Coast, it was four or five hours ahead depending on the season. It was not perfect for everyone, but it was vastly more manageable than Bangkok. I had usable mornings, a long middle-of-the-day overlap window, and most evenings back.
That taught me something I should have worked out earlier: the best time zone offset for most remote work is usually within one to three hours of your core team, or at least close enough that the overlap lands in the middle of the day. Close enough to overlap naturally. Far enough to get a head start or a clean finish, depending on direction.
Beyond three hours, compromises start accumulating. Beyond five, they become structural. Beyond seven, your routine is no longer your own.
What helped and what didn't
Things that helped:
- Blocking the first half of the day as offline. This only worked if the team accepted it, which required a direct conversation rather than hoping nobody would notice.
- Moving meetings into a single overlap window. Two hours of concentrated meetings with the team, then asynchronous the rest of the day. This required the team to cooperate, but when it worked, it changed everything.
- Separating the workspace from the living space. When your desk is in your bedroom and you are working until midnight, sleep suffers immediately. A coworking space or a separate room made the boundary feel real.
Things that did not help:
- "Just wake up earlier." This only shifts the problem. If your team's afternoon is your late evening, waking up at 6 a.m. does not fix the 10 p.m. meeting.
- Caffeine after 4 p.m. Obviously. But I did it anyway for two months before accepting the obvious.
- Pretending it was temporary. If you are planning to stay somewhere for three months or more, the routine becomes the routine. Treating it as a short-term exception does not work.
The social side of the problem
This is the bit nobody wants to say out loud. Large time zone gaps isolate you.
If your working hours overlap with the local evening, you miss the dinners, the spontaneous plans, the casual drinks that turn into the social fabric of a life abroad. You are technically in a vibrant city, but you experience it through the window of your laptop screen.
I met people in Chiang Mai who had been there for a year and still had not made proper friends because their work hours consumed every socialising window. They were not lazy or antisocial. They were just trapped in a schedule designed for a different continent.
If you are considering a big time zone jump, factor this in before you book. The rent might be cheaper. The weather might be better. But your actual life might shrink.
What I would plan upfront
I would start by checking the time zone offset before checking the weather. Seriously. A city that is two hours off from your employer is worth more to your daily life than a city that is ten hours off with perfect beaches.
I would negotiate the overlap window before leaving, not after arriving. Getting the team to agree on a compressed meeting block is much easier when you frame it as a plan rather than a problem you already have.
And I would stop treating "work from anywhere" as if it genuinely meant anywhere. It means anywhere within a range. That range is narrower than most people realise.