I am five hours ahead of London, two behind Singapore and eleven ahead of New York. None of that has cost me a client. Here is the routine that makes remote work feel local.
When I tell a new client I am based in Thimphu, there is usually a pause while they work out where that is, followed by a slightly worried question about working across time zones. It is a fair question. Bhutan is UTC+6, which puts me five or six hours ahead of the UK, two hours behind Singapore, four or five behind Sydney and ten or eleven ahead of the US East Coast.
In practice, the time difference has never been the thing that made a project hard. Vague briefs, slow feedback and unclear ownership are what make projects hard, and those happen in the same office. Here is what I actually do to make distance a non-issue.
Find one overlap and protect it
Every client gets one fixed window in their working day when they know I am reachable live. For UK clients that is their morning, my mid-afternoon. For Singapore it is most of the afternoon. For Australia it is my morning. For the US I keep early and late slots open and we agree one of them at the start of the project.
The key is that the window is written into the project plan, not improvised each week. Bhutan does not observe daylight saving, so once a slot works it keeps working; the only thing that shifts is the client’s side when their clocks change, and I flag that a week ahead.
Write more than you think you need to
Most of my communication is asynchronous, so I write updates as if the reader has just come back from a holiday. Every update says what changed, what I need from them, and when I need it by. Decisions get repeated back in writing after a call, because “I thought we agreed the other layout” is expensive at 2am.
I also record short walkthrough videos instead of scheduling calls for anything that is essentially a demonstration. A five-minute recording of a new page, with me talking through the decisions, is something a client can watch at breakfast and reply to at lunch. It saves both of us a calendar dance.
Use the gap as a feature
There is a real advantage hiding in the offset. A UK client who sends feedback at the end of their day wakes up to it done. I work while they sleep and hand back a finished round of changes before their first coffee. Several clients have told me that rhythm feels faster than working with someone down the road, because nothing waits a full working day for a reply.
Tools that do the heavy lifting
- A booking link that shows my availability in the client’s own time zone, so nobody does mental arithmetic. Mine runs on cal.com.
- Loom-style recordings for walkthroughs and handovers.
- A shared project doc that holds the scope, decisions, links and what is outstanding, so the truth lives in one place rather than across email threads.
- Staging links for every round of work, so feedback is always on something real.
Set expectations on day one
The last piece is simply telling people how it will work before they have to ask. My proposals include a short section on communication: when I am online, how quickly I reply, how updates arrive and where to find the current state of the project. Most clients have never had that spelled out by anyone, local or remote, and it does more for trust than any portfolio piece.
Being a long way away turns out to be fine. Being unclear is the problem, wherever you sit.
