Planning meetings across time zones

Start with the overlap

The first question for any international meeting is how much of everyone's working day overlaps. Taking 09:00–17:00 local time as a working day, here are typical overlaps for some common pairs, measured on mid-week days in January and July 2027:

Two patterns stand out. Gaps of up to about 5 hours leave a comfortable shared window. Gaps of 8 hours or more leave none, and someone has to work outside normal hours. The overlap also changes with the seasons whenever one place uses daylight saving time and the other does not, as with London and Dubai, or when they change in opposite directions, as with Los Angeles and Sydney. The meeting planner works this out for up to five places on any date.

Watch the clock-change weeks

Most scheduling errors happen in the weeks when countries change their clocks on different dates. In 2026 and 2027 the main ones are:

• Late October to early November: Europe changes on the last Sunday of October (25 October 2026, 31 October 2027), North America a week later (1 November 2026, 7 November 2027). London–New York drops to 4 hours for that week.
• March: North America changes on the second Sunday (14 March 2027), Europe on the last (28 March 2027). The transatlantic gap is an hour smaller for two weeks.
• Southern hemisphere: Australia and New Zealand change in early April and in late September or early October, the opposite way to Europe. In 2026, New Zealand moved its clocks forward on 27 September and Sydney on 4 October, both before Europe moved back. For a few weeks around these dates, the gap with Europe is unusual.
• Places that stopped changing in 2026: British Columbia and Alberta no longer fall back in November, and Morocco has stayed on UTC+0 since 20 September 2026. Any recurring meeting with these places that was set up using a fixed offset will now be wrong for part of the year.

Before each of these periods, check your recurring international meetings. A two-minute look at the calendar saves a lot of "I thought it was at three" emails.

Write times that cannot be misread

• Use city names, not abbreviations. "15:00 London / 10:00 New York" is unambiguous. "15:00 GMT" is wrong for half the year if you mean UK time, and "EST" in July usually means EDT.
• Include the date with the time, especially across the date line. A Monday 09:00 meeting in Sydney is Sunday afternoon or evening in Europe and the Americas.
• Send a calendar invitation with a real time zone attached, rather than a time typed into a message. Calendar software converts it for each guest and adjusts it when clocks change.
• Use the 24-hour clock for international audiences. It avoids am/pm mistakes, especially for times near midnight and noon.

Share the inconvenience

When there is no overlap, the easy option is to make the same people stretch every week, usually whoever is furthest from head office. Over months that wears people down, and it quietly excludes them from decisions. Ways to share the load:

• Rotate the slot. Alternate a meeting between a time that suits Europe and Asia and one that suits Europe and the Americas, or rotate across three time slots for a global team.
• Keep inconvenient meetings short and focused on decisions. Status updates can be written.
• Record and summarise meetings so people who cannot attend live can catch up and respond within a set time.
• Agree core collaboration hours. Even a one-hour window that everyone protects, at a known time, makes it much easier to get answers quickly.

Lean on asynchronous work

For teams spread across many time zones, the most effective change is often fewer meetings rather than better-timed ones. Written proposals, decision documents and recorded video updates let each person contribute during their own working day. A good handover note at the end of one region's day, saying what was done, what is blocked and what needs a decision, can turn a time-zone spread into an advantage, with work progressing around the clock.

This needs some discipline: agree how quickly people should reply to messages, where decisions are recorded, and which questions really need a live conversation. A useful test is whether a meeting would still be needed if everyone had read the relevant document beforehand.

Remember weekends and holidays

Not everyone's weekend falls on Saturday and Sunday. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Israel and Bangladesh, among others, have Friday–Saturday weekends, so a Sunday meeting there is a normal working day and a Friday one is not. The UAE moved to a Saturday–Sunday weekend in 2022. Public holidays differ too, and some, such as Easter, Eid and Lunar New Year, move from year to year. Check the local calendar before fixing a date for a big event. Our meeting planner excludes each person's local weekend automatically.

Late and early calls: be considerate

• Say at the start of a call that you know it is late or early for some people, and keep to time.
• Avoid booking someone else's late evening without asking. A 20:00 slot might suit one person and be impossible for another with caring responsibilities.
• Don't send messages expecting an instant answer at 03:00 local time. Use scheduled sending where your tools support it.

A simple checklist

1. List each participant's city, not just their country. Several countries have more than one time zone.
2. Check the overlap of working hours for the actual date, using the meeting planner.
3. Check whether any participant has a clock change, a weekend or a public holiday in the meeting week.
4. Send a calendar invitation in a named time zone, with the main cities' times in the description.
5. For recurring meetings, review the time before each spring and autumn change.

Related: BST vs EST · Daylight saving time explained · City time differences · Time zone converter