How to schedule a meeting across multiple time zones

If your team is in San Francisco, London, and Bangalore, scheduling a 1-hour weekly sync is a real puzzle. The right answer is rarely "split the difference." It's a series of small decisions about which zones absorb the inconvenience, when DST shifts wreck your pattern, and how to keep the same recurring slot from being everyone's worst hour.

The fastest way to find an overlap window is the meeting planner — pick the cities and the desired meeting length and it shows you which hours are reasonable for everyone. The rest of this post is the strategic part.

Step 1 — Identify the working-hours window for each city

Most professional contexts assume 9 AM to 6 PM local time. For a more realistic answer, use 10 AM to 4 PM — this excludes commute time, lunch, and the early/late hours people often use for deep work or pickup-drop-off. Anything outside that window means someone is taking a personal-time hit.

Common working-hours windows (10 AM – 4 PM local):

- San Francisco (UTC-8 / -7 with DST): 18:00–00:00 UTC in winter, 17:00–23:00 UTC in summer
- New York (UTC-5 / -4): 15:00–21:00 UTC winter, 14:00–20:00 UTC summer
- London (UTC+0 / +1): 10:00–16:00 UTC winter, 09:00–15:00 UTC summer
- Mumbai (UTC+5:30, no DST): 04:30–10:30 UTC year-round
- Tokyo (UTC+9, no DST): 01:00–07:00 UTC year-round
- Sydney (UTC+10 / +11): 00:00–06:00 UTC winter, 23:00–05:00 UTC summer (note: their summer is December)

Step 2 — Find the overlap window

You're looking for hours that fall inside everyone's window. With a typical 3-continent team:

- US East + Europe (NY + London): 15:00–16:00 UTC works year-round. That's 11 AM ET / 4 PM London. The single best transatlantic slot.
- US West + Europe (SF + London): 17:00 UTC. That's 9 AM PT / 5 PM London. Tight, but works.
- US + India (NY + Mumbai): there is no overlap window during business hours. Best you can do is 14:00–15:00 UTC = 9 AM ET / 7:30 PM IST. India absorbs the inconvenience.
- US East + India + Sydney: zero overlap during anyone's actual business hours. Either rotate the burden or go async.

This is why "best time for global meetings" is so often 14:00–17:00 UTC. It's the only window where Europe is alert, the US East Coast is at desk, and Asia hasn't yet gone to bed (just barely).

Step 3 — Watch the DST gaps

Twice a year, the EU and the US shift DST on different weekends. From the second Sunday of March to the last Sunday of March, the gap between New York and London is 4 hours instead of 5. From the last Sunday of October to the first Sunday of November, it's also 4 hours instead of 5.

If your recurring meeting is anchored to local time in one zone, it shifts an hour in the other zone during these 3 weeks per year. People show up on the wrong hour. Calendar invites become a small panic.

The fix is simple: anchor your recurring meeting to UTC. "15:00 UTC every Tuesday" is unambiguous. "11 AM Eastern" shifts twice a year and creates the gap problem.

In Google Calendar, you can do this by setting the meeting time zone to UTC (Settings → World clock → use UTC). In Outlook, set the time zone explicitly per meeting. The meeting planner defaults to UTC for the same reason.

Step 4 — Rotate the burden

If you have a team meeting where the overlap window is genuinely impossible — say, a NY/London/Tokyo all-hands — the only fair pattern is rotation.

Three approaches:

Alternating times. Every other week, the meeting is at a time that's friendly for the US-Europe pair (London 4 PM, NY 11 AM, Tokyo 1 AM — Tokyo skips). The next week it's friendly for the Europe-Asia pair (London 9 AM, Tokyo 5 PM, NY 4 AM — NY skips). Each city absorbs an awful slot half the time.

Recorded + async follow-up. Hold the meeting at the time most attendees can join live; record it; everyone else watches async and posts comments. Standard for most distributed teams over 5 people.

Multiple short meetings. Replace one 1-hour all-hands with two 30-minute regional syncs and a written summary that goes to everyone. The CEOs and team leads attend both; everyone else attends the regional one.

Step 5 — The "no late-night, no early-morning" rule

The single most common scheduling mistake is repeatedly putting the same person in a 2 AM call because they're "the international one." A pattern that's tolerable once becomes corrosive over months.

A useful rule: no recurring meeting should be scheduled outside 8 AM–8 PM local time for any required attendee. If the only overlap is outside that window for someone, either rotate, switch to async, or reconsider whether the meeting is necessary.

Practical tools

For ad-hoc scheduling:

- The meeting planner — pick cities and a date, see overlap hours
- The world clock — see live time in 5–10 cities at once
- The time converter — pick source/target zone and time, get the conversion
- Google Calendar's "Find a time" feature — works on top of attendees' calendars and respects working hours

For recurring meetings:

- Set the meeting time zone explicitly. UTC is best for global teams.
- Add the time zone of each attendee to your "World clock" sidebar in Calendar so you can see at a glance.
- For Slack, set status hours so you don't get pinged at midnight.

FAQ

What's the best time for a meeting between the US and India?

There's no overlap during normal business hours. The least-bad option is 14:00 UTC — 9 AM in New York, 7:30 PM in Mumbai. India absorbs the late-evening hit. Anything earlier is too early in India; anything later is too early in New York.

How do I avoid the EU-US DST gap?

Anchor your recurring meeting to UTC, not to local time in either zone. The gap exists because the EU and US shift DST on different weekends; a UTC-anchored meeting doesn't shift at all.

Should we just rotate the meeting time?

For teams with three or more time zones, rotation is usually the fairest answer. Pick two recurring times that swap each week, each one friendlier to a different sub-team. Make the rotation explicit in the meeting invite so no one feels singled out.

What if our team is fully async?

Then you don't need to schedule meetings at all. The async-first model works best when there's a strong written-update culture: daily or weekly written status posts, decisions made via PR review or RFC docs, and live meetings reserved for moments where async is genuinely worse (a serious disagreement, a brainstorming session, an interview).

How long is "too long" for a recurring meeting?

For a fully distributed team, 30–45 minutes is usually the upper limit. Longer meetings push attendance into people's evenings or early mornings on at least one continent, which compounds badly over months. If you genuinely need 90 minutes, split it into two smaller meetings.

Bottom line

Scheduling across time zones is mostly about respecting the hours people actually want to work and rotating the burden when there's no overlap. The math is the easy part — the meeting planner handles it for you. The hard part is making sure no single person is the one always taking the 2 AM call.

If you're doing this often, save your common configurations: pick the cities you regularly coordinate with on the world clock and bookmark the page. Reusing a known-good pattern is faster than re-inventing the schedule every quarter.