My client keeps booking me during dinner

The invitation always arrives the same way. "Does 4pm work?"

It is a courteous question. It is also asked entirely inside their own time zone, where 4pm is a perfectly ordinary slot near the end of the working day. Where you are, it is 9pm and you are halfway through dinner.

You say yes, because they are the client.

Why it keeps happening

Not malice, and usually not carelessness. Two ordinary things:

Their calendar shows their day. When they open it to find a free slot, they see their own working hours. Yours are not rendered. There is nothing on screen to prompt the thought.

You said yes the first time. Once a slot has worked, it becomes the default. Every subsequent invitation is a copy of the last one, and each acceptance confirms that the time is fine.

Neither of those corrects itself. The pattern hardens until someone names it.

The one sentence that fixes it

Most of the time this ends the moment the client can see the consequence:

"Happy to do 4pm your time — that's 9pm here, so I'd rather find something earlier in your day if we can. Anything before 1pm yours works well."

Three things are doing work in that sentence. It states the local time, which they genuinely did not know. It offers an alternative window rather than just declining. And it avoids making them wrong, which matters when they are paying you.

In practice most clients move immediately and are slightly embarrassed. They were not choosing your evening; they simply could not see it.

Say it once, in writing, early

Better still, front-load it. When the engagement starts, put your working window in their time zone somewhere they will re-read it — the statement of work, the kickoff email, your email signature:

"I'm in Prague (CET). I'm available 8am–4pm your time."

Expressing your hours in their numbers is the whole trick. "9am–5pm CET" makes them do arithmetic, and they will not.

Watch the transitions

If you are in Europe and your client is in the US, the gap between you changes twice a year — and not on the same weekends, because the two regions legislate their daylight-saving dates separately. For a couple of weeks each spring and autumn, the slot you agreed on quietly moves by an hour.

That is also the moment a standing arrangement is easiest to renegotiate, because something visibly changed. See Convert EST to GMT.

If they genuinely cannot move

Some engagements really do have a narrow overlap, and the late call is the price of the work. That is a legitimate answer — but it should be a decision you priced, not a habit you drifted into.

Related: They said EOD and I don't know whose day · EST vs EDT

Figures on this page are computed from the IANA time zone database. Last generated 2026-08-18.