If your team spans more than two time zones, every meeting becomes a math problem. Pick the wrong time and someone's at home with their kids during the call. Pick the right time and you might still rotate which side suffers. Here's how distributed teams handle this without resentment.

The basic constraints

Most people are willing to take meetings during their working day, generally 9 AM to 6 PM local. That gives:

  • U.S. East Coast (UTC−5): 9 AM–6 PM EST
  • U.S. West Coast (UTC−8): 9 AM–6 PM PST
  • U.K. (UTC+0): 9 AM–6 PM GMT
  • Continental Europe (UTC+1): 9 AM–6 PM CET
  • Israel (UTC+2): 9 AM–6 PM
  • India (UTC+5:30): 9 AM–6 PM
  • Singapore (UTC+8): 9 AM–6 PM
  • Tokyo (UTC+9): 9 AM–6 PM
  • Sydney (UTC+10): 9 AM–6 PM

The goal: find time slots where everyone is at least within their working hours.

Common pairs and their windows

U.S. East ↔ U.K. (5 hours): 4–6 PM London = 11 AM–1 PM New York. Workable for both. Most U.S./European calls happen in this window.

U.S. West ↔ U.K. (8 hours): 5 PM London = 9 AM Pacific. Tightest window — early for SF, late for London. Often the worst pairing.

U.S. East ↔ India (10.5 hours): 9:30 AM EST = 7 PM India. Late for India but doable. Or 9 AM India = 11:30 PM EST. Tough either way.

U.S. East ↔ Tokyo (14 hours): No overlap in normal working hours. Either 7 AM EST = 9 PM Tokyo (early for U.S.) or 9 PM EST = 11 AM Tokyo (late for U.S.). Most teams settle on the early-U.S. option.

U.S. West ↔ India (13.5 hours): No overlap. Either 8 AM PST = 9:30 PM India (late for India) or 8 PM PST = 9:30 AM India (late for U.S.). Pick a sacrifice.

The rotating-pain rule

If you have a regular meeting that requires off-hours for some attendees, rotate which group sacrifices. Don't always require the same team to wake up at 6 AM.

Example: U.S./India team meeting weekly. Alternate between 7 AM EST (10 AM West, 5:30 PM India) and 9 PM EST (6 PM West, 9:30 AM India next day for India). Over a month, both sides do equal off-hours time.

What to avoid

Friday evening Europe / late Friday U.S.: weekend has started somewhere. Skip Friday afternoon for international.

Monday morning anywhere: Monday is reset day. Avoid early Monday for cross-time-zone meetings.

Lunch hours (12–1 local): people prefer to eat. The occasional lunch meeting is fine; default to avoiding.

Holidays of any time zone involved: US holidays, UK bank holidays, Indian Diwali, Chinese New Year, etc. Have a shared holiday calendar.

Tools that help

  • World Time Buddy: visual side-by-side time zone comparison. Best for one-off planning.
  • Calendar tool with time-zone display: Google Calendar, Outlook show meetings in everyone's local time. Accept invites in your time, see them in your time.
  • Slack/Teams "set my working hours": Slack does not auto-snooze across time zones, but bots can be configured.
  • doodle / when2meet: for finding times that work for many people.

The DST trap

Daylight Saving Time changes don't happen worldwide simultaneously. The U.S. springs forward in March; the U.K. moves to BST a few weeks later. For 2-3 weeks each year, the U.S./U.K. time difference is 4 hours instead of 5.

The same applies in fall — the U.S. falls back before Europe. Calendar tools handle this automatically, but a meeting "at 4 PM London time" can land at 11 AM EST one week and 12 PM the next.

Check actual local times before each meeting in March/April and October/November.

Async-first culture

The best long-term answer to time-zone meetings: have fewer of them. Async-first companies make decisions in writing (Slack threads, Notion docs, async videos) and reserve synchronous meetings for genuinely interactive work.

This works especially well for software teams. Pull request reviews, design docs, and incident postmortems are all naturally async. Reserve sync for kickoffs, planning, and 1:1s where rapport matters.

Setting expectations

If your job genuinely requires sync meetings outside normal hours sometimes, talk about it explicitly:

  • What's the maximum number of off-hours meetings per month?
  • Who rotates?
  • What's the cancel/reschedule policy?
  • Are early/late attendees expected to stay full hours, or just key segments?

Distributed teams that don't talk about this end up with quiet resentment. Distributed teams that do talk about it end up with rotating burdens that feel fair.

Convert times quickly

For one-off scheduling, our time zone converter handles any pair of zones with their UTC offsets. Useful for finding "9 AM their time" in your time before you propose a meeting.