How to Schedule Meetings Across Time Zones

Why cross-zone meetings fail

Most misfires come from mental math. Someone books 9 AM their time and forgets the other side is already at dinner. Spreadsheets go stale when daylight saving starts. Chat messages like “tomorrow morning” mean different moments on different continents.

A reliable process beats clever memory. Treat every invite as a conversion problem: your local time into theirs, then back into a window both sides can accept.

A practical method that works

Use a four-step loop. First, list every participant’s city and IANA zone (for example America/New_York, Europe/London, Asia/Tokyo). Second, define “good hours” for each person, typically 9 AM–6 PM local. Third, convert a candidate slot into every local time. Fourth, keep only slots that land inside every good-hour window.

When three or more zones are involved, expect a narrow overlap or none at all. That is a feature, not a bug: better a short shared window than a call that burns one person every week.

• •Capture cities once and reuse them for every recurring stand-up.
• •Prefer UTC or a shared calendar zone as the source of truth for the invite.
• •Re-check offsets after March and November DST shifts in the US and Europe.
• •Rotate early or late slots so the same person is not always sacrificed.

Worked example: New York, London, and Tokyo

Suppose you need a 30-minute sync. New York and London often share late morning Eastern / mid-afternoon UK time. Tokyo sits roughly 13–14 hours ahead of New York depending on the season, so a US morning is evening in Japan.

A common compromise is early Eastern morning (which is afternoon in London and evening in Tokyo) or late evening Eastern (next morning in Tokyo). Open the live strip above to see where those three cities sit right now, then jump into Time Compare to test specific call times.

Daylight saving and other landmines

Daylight saving does not move every zone the same week. The US and UK spring forward on different schedules. Some regions never observe DST at all (Arizona for most of the year, Dubai, much of Asia). Fixed “plus five hours” rules break twice a year.

Always convert with a zone database that tracks DST transitions. Clockified uses IANA zones so offsets update automatically when regions shift clocks.

Book the call with Clockified

Open Time Compare, pick the destination city, and read the current local time plus suggested good hours for a call. Use Time Search when you need a zone that is not on the home world clock. Keep the hub on /guides when you want more scheduling and conversion primers.