The US West Coast / Europe Scheduling Problem

San Francisco and London are 8 hours apart in winter, 9 hours apart in summer. Standard business hours (9am–6pm) overlap by zero minutes in winter. In summer, during the brief window when the UK has moved to BST but California hasn’t yet moved to PDT, the gap reaches 9 hours and there’s literally no overlap at all.

This isn’t a scheduling challenge to optimise. It’s a structural incompatibility that needs a deliberate choice.

The actual overlap window

The only standard-hours slot where both cities are within their working day is 9–10am PST / 5–6pm GMT. One hour. Both sides at the edge of their day.

That window disappears entirely during the spring weeks when the UK has already moved to BST and the US Pacific coast hasn’t moved yet.

What to do about it

8am PST / 4pm GMT is often the most comfortable option for a recurring call. The West Coast side starts one hour early; London gets a convenient early afternoon. It requires one side to give something up, but 8am is more manageable than 5pm on a regular basis for most people.

Rotate it. If neither side should consistently take the off-hours slot, alternate quarterly. One quarter London gets the late afternoon call, next quarter San Francisco gets the early morning. Write it down — verbal agreements about rotations evaporate.

Go async-first. For a lot of West Coast / Europe working relationships, the real problem is defaulting to synchronous meetings when a shared document or structured handoff would work better. Forcing a weekly call into a one-hour window at the edge of both sides’ days every week is a high price for a meeting format that may not even be the right one.

Denver (MST, UTC−7) picks up an extra hour of overlap — a 9am MST call lands at 4pm GMT. If you have flexibility in where team members are located, this matters.

Use meetwhen to set America/Los_Angeles and Europe/London side by side. The overlap window — or absence of one — is immediately visible, and you can check how it shifts across the year.