Scheduling a meeting across time zones sounds simple until someone shows up at the wrong hour — or worse, on the wrong day. Here's how to avoid the most common pitfalls.
1. Always confirm the time zone, not just the time
"3 PM" means nothing without a time zone attached. Always specify a reference, ideally a city name (which naturally implies the correct zone and current DST status) rather than a raw offset like "GMT+2," since offsets shift with Daylight Saving Time while a city's local convention doesn't.
2. Watch for asymmetric Daylight Saving Time transitions
The US and Europe change their clocks on different dates in spring and autumn — sometimes weeks apart — which means the usual time difference between, say, New York and London can temporarily shift by an hour for a short window each year. If a recurring meeting seems to have "moved" by an hour without anyone changing the invite, this is almost always why.
3. Find true overlap hours, not just "business hours"
For distributed teams, it helps to map out the actual overlapping working hours between locations rather than assuming a full 9-to-5 window matches everywhere. A team split between San Francisco and Singapore, for example, has only a very narrow overlap window, often just an hour or two, usually early morning Pacific Time.
4. Rotate the inconvenience
If a recurring meeting is inconvenient for one region (very early or very late), consider rotating that inconvenience across participants over time rather than always asking the same team to accommodate everyone else.
5. Use a shared, unambiguous reference
Many distributed teams standardize on UTC in written schedules and calendar invites specifically because it removes local ambiguity, then let each person's calendar app handle the conversion to their own local time automatically.
6. Double-check the date, not just the hour
Because of time zone differences, a meeting at 9 PM in Tokyo can fall on the "previous" calendar day for someone in Los Angeles. When coordinating close to midnight in either location, always confirm both the time and the date together.