How to schedule meetings across time zones

Scheduling a call inside one office is trivial: everyone shares the same clock, so any slot in the working day is as good as another. Spread the same people across a few countries and the question quietly changes shape. There is rarely a time that is equally convenient for everyone, and the naive fix — pick whatever suits the person organising the meeting — has a hidden cost: it lands on whoever happens to sit furthest east or west, who ends up taking the call before breakfast or after dinner, every time. Scheduling well across time zones is mostly about seeing that cost clearly and then deciding, deliberately, how to share it.

Look for the overlap window, not a single time

The useful thing to picture is not a clock but a band: the hours where two people’s working days actually overlap. Take London and New York, usually five hours apart. If both keep a normal nine-to-five, New York’s morning only reaches London in the early afternoon — the shared band runs from about 2pm to 5pm London time, which is 9am to noon in New York. That is three comfortable hours, and any meeting inside it is fair to both ends.

Now add a third person in San Francisco, eight hours behind London. Their working day does not begin until London’s is nearly over, so the band where all three overlap collapses to essentially nothing — there is no hour that is inside normal working time in London, New York and California at once. This is the single most useful thing to internalise about scheduling across zones: overlap does not shrink gently as you add people, it falls off a cliff. Two zones a few hours apart are easy; a third far-flung one can wipe out the shared window entirely.

When the gap is too big, stop forcing a live meeting

Some pairings simply have no humane overlap. India and the US west coast sit roughly twelve and a half to thirteen and a half hours apart, depending on daylight saving — one side’s morning is the other’s late night, with no working-hours slot in between. When you are in that situation, insisting on a synchronous meeting means someone is always giving up their evening or their sleep. The honest response is to move as much of the work as possible off the live call: a written status update that each person reads at the start of their own day, a shared document that the two halves of the team hand off like a baton as the planet turns, decisions recorded in text rather than made in a room. This "follow the sun" handoff is not a consolation prize — for teams far apart it is usually faster than waiting for the next painful overlap to come around.

Share the pain on purpose, and watch daylight saving

For the meetings that do have to be live, fairness is a matter of rotation rather than of any one perfect time. If a recurring call can only ever be early for Sydney or late for London, alternate it: this month it is uncomfortable for one side, next month for the other. Rotating the burden is a small act of scheduling that teams remember, and it is far better received than quietly asking the same person to be up at 6am indefinitely.

The subtler trap is daylight saving. The gap between two cities is not a fixed number — it changes when either of them puts its clocks forward or back, and they rarely do so on the same day. Because the United States and Europe switch on different weekends, there are a couple of weeks each spring and autumn when the usual New York–London gap is four hours instead of five, and a recurring meeting pinned to one city’s time silently lands an hour off at the other end. Places that do not observe daylight saving at all — most of Asia and Africa, and Arizona in the US — drift relative to everyone who does, twice a year. If a standing meeting suddenly feels wrong for a fortnight, this is almost always why.

A quick way to get it right

In practice the fastest method is to check the real overlap rather than do the arithmetic in your head. The meeting planner lays several cities side by side and shades the hours that are inside everyone’s working day, so a workable slot — or the absence of one — is visible at a glance. The world clock is quicker for a sanity check on where each person is in their day right now, and the time difference pages spell out the current gap between any two cities, including whether daylight saving is widening or narrowing it this week. Between them, the guesswork — and the accidental 6am call — mostly disappears.