How to schedule meetings across time zones

With a fully remote or distributed team, there's rarely a meeting time that's equally convenient for everyone — the goal is usually to find the time that's least inconvenient, and to rotate the pain fairly if no single time works for everyone.

1. Map out the real gaps, not the rounded ones

"Roughly 12 hours apart" hides a lot. Sydney and Los Angeles are 17–19 hours apart depending on the time of year (because Australia and the US shift into daylight saving at different points), which is a very different scheduling problem than a clean 12-hour split. Before picking a time, check the actual current gap for the specific week you're scheduling — not a number you remember from a previous project.

2. Define each region's "reasonable hours"

A meeting at 7am is a fine start to the day for some people and a genuine hardship for parents doing school drop-off, or for anyone with a long commute. A rough default — 8am to 6pm local time — is a reasonable starting band, but it's worth actually asking teams what their limits are rather than assuming.

3. Look for the overlap window first

For two regions with a moderate gap (say, 6–9 hours), there's often a genuine overlap in reasonable hours — commonly a window in each side's morning or late afternoon. For gaps beyond about 10–11 hours, there usually isn't a comfortable overlap at all, and someone is going to be either very early or very late.

4. When there's no good overlap, rotate it

If a recurring meeting genuinely can't land in reasonable hours for every region, alternate who takes the hit — early one week for group A, late the next. This is generally better received than permanently fixing the inconvenient time on the same group, even if the rotation is logistically slightly messier.

5. Send the invite in a way that survives DST

Calendar invites created with a specific timezone attached (rather than a fixed UTC timestamp) will automatically re-adjust for each recipient if either region's daylight saving dates change or if a recipient travels — which is usually what you want for a recurring meeting. For a one-off event, double-check the converted time close to the actual date, since long-lead invites are exactly when DST transition mismatches tend to sneak in.

Use the converter to check the live gap between your regions for the actual date you're scheduling, or jump to a popular city pair for a preset comparison.