How to Schedule Meetings Across Time Zones
Pick the time in one zone, convert it for everybody else, put the date and zone in the invite, and check that nobody has to show up at 3 AM. That's most of it. A calendar invite with the right time zone does a surprising amount of the remaining work for you.
Finding a time that works
- Start with where everyone is, using city names rather than "EST" or "IST". A city tells the tool about daylight saving, whereas a three-letter code doesn't always.
- Look for the overlap, aiming for roughly 8 AM to 9 PM for everyone. With two places there's usually a window, but with four or five there may not be one, and someone will have to take an early or late slot.
- Convert it and check the date, because the same moment can be Monday in Sydney and Sunday in New York.
- Send a proper calendar invite, so each person sees the time in their own zone and nobody does any sums.
- Write the time and its zone in the message as well, like "Thursday 15:00 UTC", in case someone reads it outside their calendar.
Who gets the awkward slot?
If the same side always joins late at night, they'll get tired of it quickly, and you'll notice. A habit that works for a lot of teams is to rotate the slot so the early starts and late finishes get shared around. For a US and India team that usually means early morning in the US, which is evening in India; there isn't a perfect hour for those two. The UK and India have it easier, since a late-morning call in the UK lands in India's early evening.
What goes wrong most often
Daylight saving weeks cause the most trouble. The US and Europe change their clocks on different dates, so a weekly meeting can slide by an hour for a few weeks, so double-check in March, late October and early November. Half-hour zones are the next culprit: India is UTC+05:30 and Nepal UTC+05:45, which is easy to forget (there's more in half-hour and 45-minute time zones).
Weekends and holidays catch people too, since some countries have a Friday and Saturday weekend and public holidays vary a lot. And then there's "tomorrow at 9", which raises the obvious question of whose tomorrow and whose 9. Spell it out.
Tools that help
The Meeting Planner puts several cities on one timeline so the shared working hours are visible at a glance, while the Time Zone Converter is quicker for a single conversion. Common pairs have their own ready pages, like IST to EST, and if you're calling India regularly, the calling guide has a table.
Should you put UTC in the invite? Only if your team already thinks in UTC. For most people, a calendar invite that converts itself is far easier.