How to Schedule Meetings Across Time Zones
Business & Remote Work
Scheduling a meeting in one office is easy. The moment your colleagues, clients or teammates are spread across continents, a single “3 PM” can mean breakfast for one person and bedtime for another. This guide walks through a reliable way to pick times that work across time zones, share them without confusion, and keep the inconvenience fair for everyone involved.
- Always anchor a meeting to a single reference such as UTC, then convert into each person’s local time.
- Find the overlap in everyone’s working hours before you propose a slot.
- State the time zone explicitly — “15:00 UTC”, not just “3 PM”.
- When no comfortable overlap exists, rotate the awkward hour so the same person is not always inconvenienced.
- Watch out for Daylight Saving Time: clock changes happen on different dates in different regions.
Start With a Single Reference Time
The root cause of almost every scheduling mistake is treating “the time” as if it were the same everywhere. It is not. The fix is to pick one neutral reference and translate everything through it. The natural choice is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the global standard from which every time zone is measured.
Decide on a moment in UTC first, then convert it into each participant’s local clock. Because UTC never changes for Daylight Saving Time, it gives you a stable anchor that cannot drift while you are still agreeing on a slot. If it helps your team, store the canonical time in UTC in your calendar notes and let each person’s own device show their local equivalent.
Find the Overlapping Working Hours
Before suggesting any time, map out when each person is actually available. The goal is the window where everyone’s working day overlaps. A quick way to do this:
- Write down each participant’s normal working hours in their own local time (say 9:00–17:00).
- Convert each of those windows to UTC.
- Look for the hours that all the windows share — that is your meeting zone.
For example, a typical 9-to-5 in three cities looks like this once expressed in UTC (using standard winter offsets):
| City | Local working hours | Same hours in UTC |
|---|---|---|
| London (UTC+00:00) | 09:00–17:00 | 09:00–17:00 |
| New York (UTC−05:00) | 09:00–17:00 | 14:00–22:00 |
| Berlin (UTC+01:00) | 09:00–17:00 | 08:00–16:00 |
The shared window here is 14:00–16:00 UTC — that is early afternoon in London, mid-morning in New York and late afternoon in Berlin. Any time in that band works for all three without forcing anyone to join outside business hours.
To check the current local time and UTC offset for any location, open its city page on this site — the live clock and offset are shown together, which makes converting between zones quick.
Pick a Time That Is Fair to Everyone
Sometimes a clean overlap simply does not exist. A team split between, say, San Francisco (UTC−8) and Tokyo (UTC+9) has almost no shared working day — the difference is 17 hours. When that happens, someone has to take an early or late call. The fair approach is not to make it always the same person:
- Rotate the inconvenient slot. If a recurring meeting falls early for the Americas one month, shift it so it falls early for Asia the next. Sharing the discomfort keeps morale up on distributed teams.
- Favour the edges of the day. Early morning for one region and early evening for another is usually kinder than the middle of someone’s night.
- Respect personal boundaries. Avoid slots that land during typical sleeping hours, school runs or local public holidays.
For specific regional combinations, see our guides on the best time for meetings between Europe and the USA and the best time for meetings between Europe and Asia.
Always State the Time Zone Explicitly
A surprising number of missed meetings come down to one missing detail: the time zone. “Let us meet at 3 PM” is ambiguous the instant two people are in different zones. Make the reference unmistakable:
- Name the zone or offset. Write “15:00 UTC” or “3:00 PM New York time (EST)”, not just “3 PM”.
- Use a 24-hour clock where you can. “15:00” removes any AM/PM mix-up.
- Spell out the date. Across the date line, a meeting can fall on a different calendar day for different people, so include the date alongside the time.
- Let the calendar do the conversion. Tools such as Google Calendar, Outlook and Apple Calendar store the event in a fixed instant and display it in each attendee’s own local time automatically — this is the safest way to share a time.
Watch Out for Daylight Saving Time
Time-zone offsets are not fixed all year. Many countries shift their clocks by an hour for Daylight Saving Time, and — crucially — they do not all do it on the same date. For a couple of weeks each spring and autumn, the gap between two cities can be an hour different from what you expect.
Two habits protect you:
- Anchor recurring meetings to one city’s local time (whichever is most central) and let everyone else’s clock follow, rather than fixing a UTC time that quietly shifts relative to local life.
- Double-check the week of a clock change. Around mid-March, late March, late October and early November, confirm the offset before an important call.
Some places, such as most of Asia, do not observe Daylight Saving Time at all, which actually makes them easier to plan around.
Make Asynchronous Work the Default
The most resilient distributed teams treat live meetings as the exception, not the rule. When the overlap is small, push as much as possible into asynchronous channels so a meeting is only needed for genuine discussion:
- Share written updates, recordings and documents people can read on their own schedule.
- Record important meetings so anyone who could not attend at a humane hour can catch up.
- Reserve synchronous time for decisions and relationship-building, not status reporting.
For a deeper look at running a team this way, see Working with Remote Teams Across Time Zones.
A Simple Checklist
Before you send the invite, run through these steps:
- List every participant and their local time zone.
- Convert each working day to UTC and find the overlap.
- Choose a slot inside that overlap — or rotate a fair compromise if there is none.
- Confirm no one is affected by a recent or upcoming clock change.
- Create the calendar event so each attendee sees it in their own time.
- In the invite text, state the time with an explicit zone and the date.
Follow that routine and the most common errors disappear. For the specific traps to avoid, read How to Avoid Time Zone Scheduling Mistakes.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best time of day for a global meeting?
There is no universal answer, but late morning to early afternoon UTC tends to overlap the working hours of Europe, the Americas and parts of Asia better than any other window. Always confirm against each participant’s actual local time.
Should I schedule meetings in UTC?
Use UTC as the reference for working out the slot, because it never changes. When you send the invite, though, let your calendar app display the time in each person’s local zone so no one has to do the maths.
How do I handle Daylight Saving Time in recurring meetings?
Anchor the recurring event to one location’s local time and check the offset around the dates when regions change their clocks, since they do not all switch on the same day.
What if there is no overlap in working hours at all?
Rotate the inconvenient time so the burden is shared, lean on asynchronous communication, and record the meeting for anyone who cannot reasonably attend. See Working with Remote Teams Across Time Zones for more.