How to Schedule a Meeting Across Time Zones

Picking a meeting time for a distributed team is not about finding the perfect slot — there usually isn’t one. It’s about finding the least bad slot and communicating it without ambiguity.

Start with UTC. Write down each person’s working hours in UTC. Tokyo works 9am–6pm JST (00:00–09:00 UTC). New York’s 9am–6pm EST is 14:00–23:00 UTC. Once everything is in the same reference frame, the overlap (or lack of it) becomes obvious. meetwhen does this for you visually — add the zones and see where they intersect.

When overlap is tight, bias toward the east. A 4pm London meeting is 8am New York — manageable for both sides. Pushing it to 5pm London is still fine for New York at 9am. The person east of you is already further into their day, so earlier is generally better for them.

If there’s no clean overlap, rotate. San Francisco and Singapore have no usable shared business hours. Someone will always be on a call at 7am or 10pm. The least you can do is take turns — track it explicitly so it doesn’t default to the same person every week.

Write the invite in UTC. “3pm EST” in a calendar invite is a trap waiting to spring during DST transitions. Put the UTC time in the invite description alongside local equivalents. Or paste in a meetwhen share link — each recipient sees the time in their own zone when they open it.