How to Write a Meeting Invite That Works for Everyone

A calendar invite across time zones has one job: every participant should know exactly when to show up without trusting that their calendar tool converted the time correctly. Most invites don’t quite achieve this.

The title: don’t put times in it

Titles don’t adjust to local time. “Sync — 3pm EST / 8pm London” goes stale, doesn’t convert for recipients in other zones, and clutters busy calendars. Keep it clean — the time is what the event itself is for.

The description: put UTC there

Calendar tools usually handle time zone conversion correctly. Old calendar clients, forwarded invites, and manual imports sometimes don’t. Adding an explicit UTC line in the description covers those cases:

Meeting time: Wednesday 25 June at 14:00 UTC New York: 10am EDT · London: 3pm BST · Singapore: 10pm SGT

Anyone can verify the conversion at a glance, and anyone whose tool silently dropped the time zone has an authoritative reference.

If you’re inviting people across more than 3–4 cities, include a meetwhen link in the description instead of listing every permutation — participants can check the time in their own city.

For recurring meetings: check after DST transitions

A recurring meeting set up in January will stay correct through the year only if all participants are in the same DST region (they all shift together) or the invite is anchored in UTC. If you have participants in mixed DST regions, verify the UTC time once after each DST transition to confirm the meeting still lands where you intended.

The location field

If the meeting is remote, put the video call link in the location field, not just the description. That’s where people look when they’re joining 30 seconds before the call.

What to avoid

• “3pm EST” in the invite description — EST and EDT are different things. Write the UTC time or the full IANA city (America/New_York).
• Putting times only in the title — they don’t update when clocks change.

For external meetings that matter — client calls, executive briefings — send a confirmation email the day before restating the time in UTC and the recipient’s local zone. A forwarded invite may not have arrived in their calendar correctly; the email is a reliable fallback.