How to Schedule Meetings Across Time Zones

Start with working hours, not clocks

Before comparing times, write down when each participant actually works. A standard office day of 09:00 to 18:00 is a useful default, but many people start earlier, finish later or block out school runs and lunch. The goal is not to find a time when every clock shows a round number; it is to find a time when everyone is awake, at a desk and not in the middle of their own commute.

Also check the working week. Most of Europe, the Americas and Asia work Monday to Friday, and the UAE moved to a Monday to Friday week in 2022, but some countries in the Middle East still keep Friday or Saturday as part of the weekend. A Friday afternoon meeting in London can land on a weekend elsewhere.

Find the overlap

Line the participants' days up side by side and look for the hours where every working window overlaps. For London and New York there are usually four or five shared hours in the London afternoon. For New York and Mumbai there is often no full overlap at all, so one side has to stretch. A visual planner, such as the one on WorldTimeFX, shades night, working hours and the edges of the day so the overlap is obvious at a glance instead of being worked out on paper.

When there is no overlap, look for the least painful compromise: an early start for one side and a late finish for the other usually beats a single person joining in the middle of the night. Keep these meetings short and focused, and move anything that can be asynchronous into a shared document or recorded update.

Rotate the inconvenient slot

If a recurring meeting always lands at 07:00 for the same team, that team quietly carries the cost of the whole group. Rotating the time every few weeks, or alternating between two slots, spreads the burden fairly. Teams that rotate tend to report better attendance and less frustration than teams where one region always compromises.

Watch daylight saving changes

Offsets between cities are not fixed. The United States changes its clocks on the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November, while the UK and the European Union change on the last Sunday in March and October. For a few weeks each year the gap between New York and London is four hours instead of five. India, Dubai, Singapore and Tokyo do not change their clocks at all, so their gap to Europe and North America shifts by an hour twice a year. Check recurring meetings around these dates and warn attendees in advance.

Send invites that cannot be misread

Always send invites from a calendar app that stores the event in a real time zone, so each attendee sees it in their local time automatically. In the body of the invite, spell out the time for the main locations, for example "15:00 London / 10:00 New York / 20:30 Mumbai". Avoid writing only an abbreviation like EST or IST: many people write EST all year even when the US East Coast is on daylight time, and several abbreviations mean different things in different countries. Using 24-hour times also removes any confusion between morning and evening.

Keep a short checklist

Before you send the invite, run through five checks: everyone's working hours are respected; the day is a working day in every location; no daylight saving change falls between now and the meeting; the invite is created in a proper time zone; and the body lists local times for the key cities. It takes a minute and prevents most scheduling mistakes.

Finally, share the plan itself. A link to a meeting planner view with the chosen cities and time lets colleagues check the slot for themselves, suggest a better window and see at once whether the meeting falls early or late for them.