Meeting across time zones: find a slot that works everywhere

Why scheduling is harder than it looks#

When attendees are 8–15 hours apart, one person's morning is another person's late night, and the usable hours on any given day are few.

The goal is not a full day when everyone is working; it is a window where working hours overlap, and afternoons in one region often line up with mornings in another.

The overlap method#

Convert one fixed moment into every attendee's local time, or draw a 24-hour row per timezone and look for the common working hours across all of them.

A practical starting point: convert your morning into their late afternoon, then slide the meeting by whole hours and check every timezone again each time.

Daylight saving traps#

DST starts and ends on different dates, shifts by different amounts, and is not observed everywhere, so a window that works in May can move by an hour by November.

Offsets can change mid-week, and a few regions even shift by 30 minutes when they change, which is enough to break a fixed weekly habit.

Half-hour and quarter-hour zones#

Several countries use :30 or :45 offsets (India is UTC+5:30, Nepal UTC+5:45), so a habit of assuming every zone moves in whole hours will not transfer.

If you assume every timezone shifts by whole hours, a time that looks sensible can land in the middle of someone's night.

Picking a fair time#

The fairest slot is usually the one closest to the middle of everyone's overlap, so the same people do not always take the early-morning or late-night hit.

For recurring meetings, rotate the slot or use a planner that suggests a window, and state the time with an explicit UTC offset so the invite reads unambiguously.

Checklist before you send the invite#

Before sending: confirm which calendar day the moment falls on in each attendee's timezone, check for DST transitions that week, and write times as local time plus offset.

Then paste the chosen time into a timezone planner and double-check every city before pressing send.

Sources

• IANA time zone database
• timeanddate world clock