Hey,
Last issue was about the actual move, what to pack, what to ship, how to find a real place to live. If you followed any of that, you're probably somewhere in the Philippines right now, or close to it. Remember I told you my sister came 3 weeks ago, and I remember what she was dealing with immediately after landing. The main thing was the time difference.
Its the next thing that hits you, and nobody warns you about it either. Your clock changes, and I don't just mean the number on your phone. Your whole rhythm flips.
◆ // THE PLAY
Your Body Doesn't Care About Your Business Plan
The first few weeks, this messes with you. Your body wants to sleep when it's dark, and it's dark here while your clients back home are wide awake and messaging you like it's the middle of a normal workday. You're groggy on calls. You're wide awake at 3am with an entire country of people you know completely unreachable. It's disorienting before it's ever useful.
You don't fix that by pushing through it. You fix it by actually rebuilding your schedule around the real time gap instead of fighting it. I’ve had to sleep early in the day for 3 hours just to make sure I’d make up for the time I’ll be awake at night. You can’t make money here if your on southeast Asian time, if your clients are on New York time.
Here's the anchor point I use for everything: 7pm in Cebu is always 7am in New York (EST). Clean 12 hour flip, easy to remember, easy to build a whole day around.
One wrinkle worth knowing: Arizona (MST) doesn't observe daylight saving, so depending on the time of year, Arizona (MST) and California (PST) can be the same time or an hour apart. I check my watch and know exactly what time it is in New York, Arizona, and California without thinking about it anymore, but it took a minute to get there. Don't memorize a fixed table, just check your specific client's current time before you build your week around it, the offset shifts twice a year and Arizona is the one that always trips people up.
Once you've got that anchor, the real skill is sequencing your day by client time zone, not by the clock on your wall. If you called every US client at the same Philippine-time hour, you'd be calling your East Coast clients too late and your West Coast clients while they're still asleep. That's not a schedule, that's just noise at the wrong times.
What actually works: start with East Coast around 7pm Cebu time, since that's their morning. Work through Central next as their day opens. By the time those wrap, West Coast has finally woken up too, and you can close your day with them. Calling everyone at the same moment means hitting someone at 5am their time or interrupting someone else at lunch. Staggering it by zone means you're never bothering anyone, you're just showing up exactly when their day actually starts.
Run that sequence and you get a real, continuous block, roughly 7pm to 2am Cebu time, that covers East Coast through West Coast without wasted dead time in between. That's not a burnout schedule, that's just working with the gap instead of against it. The best part about it is you’re wide awake and your day was complete by the time you start working. You can always schedule whenever you want, but the point is squeezing those hours makes it seem like your not even overseas. Its as if your in your office kicking back in America calling your clients like normal. They shouldn’t even notice if you did it right.
This setup works especially well for cold calling and remote customer support, where you need to hit people during real business hours. If you're freelance, you've got it even easier, you set your own meeting times, so you can build your entire calendar around this block from day one instead of discovering it the hard way like I did.
◆ // THE MOVE
This week, map your own version of the 7pm-7am anchor.
Figure out what time your biggest client base actually starts their day, then work backward to figure out your real work block here. Don't assume you need to be available 24 hours just because the time difference makes it feel that way. You need to be sharp during a real window, not groggy and half-present all day long.
You have to take care of Philippines life while your here, you can’t ignore your day life either. You might have to go get water 5 gallon water refill on a motorbike, or you might need bananas to go with your oatmeal. Hit the day market to grab some bangus fish, and coconut water. You have time to go pay a few bills during the day and even see the latest action movie that hasn’t even launched in united states yet. Get your snacks and drinks head back home shower get the humidity off, then get mentally ready to take calls. Get your research done, if there’s a power out you’ll already be ready for it.
I made a full video on exactly this, what to actually do when the power goes out mid-call and you need to keep a client on the line anyway → https://youtu.be/sSSDPww5gzY
Once you've got your window, protect it like it's an actual asset, because it is. The founders who last here aren't the ones grinding around the clock. They're the ones who figured out their real hours and built a life around them instead of just working whenever a notification went off.
◆ // ONE MORE THING
I'm putting more of this, the actual relocation side, the geo-arbitrage side, over on YouTube, and subscribers there get first look before anything hits the newsletter. If you want the earlier, more detailed version of stuff like this, that's where it's going → youtube.com/@ExpatBuildr
None of this, the time zones, the currency plays, the moving logistics, matters if you can't actually build income here. That's the whole point of everything in this newsletter. Not just getting here, staying, on your own terms, instead of getting forced into a rushed flight home because the income side never got solved.
— Galaxy (Tony Long II) 🌏
Building from Cebu. Earning in USD. Sharing the math.
P.S. — Free forever → newsletter.galaxyarbitrage.com/subscribe
P.P.S. — Subscribe on YouTube for the stuff that goes up before the newsletter does → youtube.com/@ExpatBuildr