How to Schedule a Meeting Across Time Zones (The Complete Guide)
You send the invite and everyone accepts. Twenty minutes before the call, someone in the Singapore office messages: "Wait, is this 9 AM your time or mine?"
That's the usual way cross-time-zone meetings fail. Not through bad arithmetic, but because someone accepted an invite without checking, a tool showed "9 AM" in local time without saying whose, or an abbreviation like "EST" was used in July, when New York is on EDT. This is a method that avoids all three, with one team worked through start to finish.
The Method in Six Steps
- Write down working hours for each person. Use real hours, not a tidy 9 to 5 for everyone. 9 AM to 6 PM is a sensible default.
- Convert each day to UTC, for the date of the meeting. Not today's offset: the offset on the day. A person in London is UTC+0 in January and UTC+1 in July.
- Find where all the windows meet. Only inside that overlap is everyone at work.
- If they don't meet, pick the least-bad time and plan to rotate it.
- Write the invite so it can't be misread (see below).
- Check again when a clock changes.
A Worked Example: Chicago, London and Mumbai
Take a team in these three cities and a meeting in January. Everyone works 9 AM to 6 PM.
| City | 9 AM to 6 PM local | In UTC |
|---|---|---|
| Chicago | CST, UTC-6 | 15:00 to 00:00 |
| London | GMT, UTC+0 | 09:00 to 18:00 |
| Mumbai | IST, UTC+5:30 | 03:30 to 12:30 |
London and Chicago overlap for three hours (15:00 to 18:00 UTC, which is 9 AM to noon in Chicago). London and Mumbai overlap for three and a half (09:00 to 12:30 UTC, which is 2:30 to 6 PM in Mumbai). Chicago and Mumbai don't overlap at all, so there's no time that suits all three. Seeing that plainly saves a lot of back and forth.
The least-bad start, if everyone has to be on the same call, is 14:00 UTC. That's 8:00 AM in Chicago (an hour early), 2:00 PM in London and 7:30 PM in Mumbai (an hour and a half late). In July the same method gives 13:00 UTC: 8:00 AM in Chicago (now on CDT), 2:00 PM in London (BST) and 6:30 PM in Mumbai, because India doesn't change its clocks and the other two do.
Two sensible answers follow. Either hold the call at that time and rotate who takes the awkward hours (how to run a fair meeting rotation), or split it into two shorter regional calls and share notes in writing.
Writing the Invite
Most missed calls come from the invite, not the conversion. Four rules:
- Name the zone, and prefer a city. "9:00 AM Chicago time" or "9:00 AM CST (Chicago)", not "9:00 AM CST" (why).
- Include the date. Across a large offset, "tomorrow" or "Thursday" can mean different days in different places.
- Give both local times when you can. "8:00 AM Chicago / 2:00 PM London / 7:30 PM Mumbai" is easy to check and hard to misread.
- Set recurring meetings in a named zone, not a fixed offset. In a calendar app, "Eastern Time" follows daylight saving and "UTC-5" doesn't.
When the Clocks Change
The US and the UK and EU change on different dates, so a recurring call can move by an hour for a few weeks without anyone touching it. For New York and London, the gap is 4 hours instead of 5 for two to three weeks from the second Sunday in March (in 2026, March 8 to 28) and for one week in late October and early November (October 25 to 31). India doesn't change at all, so a call between New York and Mumbai moves by an hour in March and again in November.
So put a reminder in the calendar a fortnight before each change and look at the recurring meetings. The dates for any year are on the daylight saving pages.
Pairs People Ask About
The windows for common pairs are in this overlap table, and a few points come up often:
- New York and London share four working hours, 9 AM to 1 PM in New York.
- San Francisco and London share only one, 9 to 10 AM in San Francisco.
- The US and India have no shared working hours at all; the US and India guide gives the compromise windows for every US zone.
What to Do Next
Run the six steps for your own team once, and keep the result: a list of cities, UTC windows, and the agreed time written in each person's local time. Use the time zone converter with the date set for the conversions, and the meeting scheduler to test a proposed slot for up to three places and see who's outside a 9 to 5 day. When the team's calendar settles, the world clock is a quick check on who's online right now.
Related Articles
- How to Work Remotely Across Time Zones Without Losing Your Mind: counting overlap, core hours and async habits for distributed teams.
- Best Meeting Time for US and India Teams: the compromise windows for the East Coast, Central, Mountain and West Coast.
- World Clock vs Time Zone Converter: Which Tool Do You Actually Need?: which tool answers which question.
- Common Time Zone Scheduling Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them): the Friday-Saturday weekend, ambiguous abbreviations and other traps, with a fix for each.