How to Schedule Meetings Across Time Zones

Scheduling across time zones is mostly about respecting other people’s working hours and removing ambiguity. A few habits make it reliable, whether you are booking a one-off call or a weekly stand-up spanning three continents.

Find the overlap first

Start from each participant’s working day, not from your own clock. The goal is the window where everyone’s reasonable hours overlap. For widely separated zones that window can be narrow — sometimes only an hour or two — so identify it before proposing a time.

A meeting planner that shows each zone’s working hours side by side turns this into a glance instead of mental arithmetic.

• List every participant’s city or time zone.
• Mark each person’s acceptable hours (e.g. 8 a.m.–6 p.m. local).
• Pick a slot inside the shared overlap; rotate the pain if there is none.

Always state the zone

Never send an invite that just says "3 p.m." Write "3 p.m. New York (UTC−4)" or, better, let calendar software attach the time zone so each person sees their own local time automatically.

For announcements to a wide audience, an event time page that shows the moment in every viewer’s local zone removes the guesswork entirely.

Watch for daylight saving

Recurring meetings drift when one region changes its clocks and another does not. For a few weeks in spring and autumn the usual offset is off by an hour. Anchor recurring events to a specific location’s time so your calendar handles the shift, and warn attendees around known changeover dates.