Most of my favourite frames happen in the fifteen minutes before the light disappears. The sky doesn't glow yet — it just softens — and everything the sun touches gets quiet. If you set up your shot for that window, you're effectively rolling the dice on one brief moment. Which means you have to stop thinking of light as a tool you apply to a subject, and start thinking of it as the subject itself.
The difference, practically: on a commercial shoot I'll have the setup ready forty minutes early and spend those minutes just watching. I'm not shooting yet. I'm reading the air. Which direction is the shadow moving? Is there haze? Is the west-facing window warmer than I expected?
The shoot starts when the light tells me it wants to start. Not before. This is the hardest thing to sell to a client who's paying by the hour. But it's the only way I've found to get the frames I actually want to live with.
A short confession: nine times out of ten, I end up with maybe three keepers from that golden-hour window. Three. That's it. The rest of a session builds the contact sheet, but those three are the ones that make it to the final edit.