How to pick a meeting time across time zones without annoying everyone
A practical way to find an hour that works when your team is spread across three continents, and why the obvious approaches keep failing.
· 4 min read
Scheduling one meeting across two time zones is a bit of arithmetic. Across four, it stops being arithmetic and starts being politics. Someone is always the person who takes the 6am call, and if you aren't careful it's the same someone every week.
Here is how to do it so the cost gets shared, and the maths stops being your problem.
Start from windows, not from a time
The usual approach is to propose a time and see who complains. That puts everyone in the position of either accepting a bad slot or being the difficult one, so most people just accept. You end up with a meeting that technically works and quietly costs someone their evening.
Propose a few windows instead. A window is a range you're genuinely available in, in your own clock, say Tuesday and Wednesday, 9 to 5. Everyone else marks what suits them inside those windows, in theirs. Nobody has to convert anything, and nobody has to be the one who says no.
The other advantage: windows make the overlap visible. If four people mark their availability and the only common hour is 11pm for one of them, that's now a fact on the screen rather than an argument.
Know where the overlap actually is
Some pairs of cities have a comfortable overlap and some have almost none. Worth knowing which one you're in before you start:
| Cities | Working-hours overlap | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| London and New York | About 3 hours | Comfortable. Early afternoon London, morning New York. |
| Sydney and San Francisco | Effectively none | Someone is up early or late. Rotate it. |
| Berlin and Bangalore | About 4 hours | Fine, if you keep it to the afternoon in Berlin. |
| Sydney and London | About 1 hour | Very tight. Sydney early morning or London late evening. |
If your overlap is under two hours, don't go looking for the perfect slot. There isn't one. Decide who takes the hit this time, and write down that it was them.
Rotate the pain, and say so out loud
For a recurring meeting with no good overlap, the fair thing is to alternate: this month the call is friendly to Sydney, next month it's friendly to San Francisco. The important part isn't the rotation itself, it's saying it out loud so the person taking the bad slot knows it's temporary and noticed.
A quiet rotation that nobody acknowledges reads, to the person getting up at 5am, exactly like no rotation at all.
Watch the daylight saving gap
Northern and southern hemispheres change clocks in opposite directions, and not on the same dates. For a few weeks each year the gap between, say, Sydney and London shifts by two hours rather than one. A recurring meeting that was fine in June is suddenly an hour worse in October.
Two things help. Anchor recurring meetings to a specific person's local time rather than to UTC, so at least one end stays stable. And check any long-running series after each changeover, because the calendar invite won't warn you.
Keep the decision in one place
The part that actually wastes time is rarely the maths. It's the thread: eleven messages, three of them proposing times that were already ruled out, one person who missed the whole thing and replies two days later.
Whatever tool you use, the goal is that everyone can see the same picture of who can do what, and that the decision lands somewhere findable. A single link that shows the overlap beats a thread every time.
FAQ
What is the fairest way to schedule a recurring meeting across time zones?
Rotate which zone gets the comfortable slot, and tell everyone that's what you're doing. If one region always gets the good hour, the others notice well before they mention it.
How do I handle daylight saving when scheduling internationally?
Anchor the meeting to one person's local time rather than to UTC, and re-check the series after each changeover. Northern and southern hemispheres shift in opposite directions and on different dates, so overlaps that worked in one season can move by two hours in another.
Is there an overlap that works for the whole world?
No. Roughly 09:00 to 11:00 UTC catches Europe, Africa, India and Asia at reasonable hours, but it's the middle of the night in the Americas. For genuinely global teams, record the meeting and rotate the live slot.
How many time options should I propose?
Two or three windows, not twenty individual times. Enough that people have a real choice, few enough that reading it takes ten seconds.
The short version
Propose windows rather than times, in your own clock. Let everyone answer in theirs. Look at where the overlap actually is before you go hunting for a perfect slot, rotate the bad hour when there isn't one, and re-check recurring meetings after the clocks change.
VennMeet does the middle part: you paint a few windows, everyone else marks what works in their own time zone, and the times that suit the most people come out ranked. It's free, and there are no accounts.