ShareYourGroupShareYourGroupTime Zones

How to fix a meeting across time zones

Choosing an hour for a call between two or three countries looks hard and is in fact a small, mechanical job. Here is a method that works every time, with real examples.

Step 1: write down the offsets for the date

Find each place's offset from UTC on the day of the meeting, not today. India is always UTC+5:30. London is UTC in winter and UTC+1 in summer. New York is UTC−5 in winter and UTC−4 in summer. Singapore is always UTC+8. The date matters because the clocks in London and New York move, and they do not move on the same weekend.

Step 2: decide what hours are acceptable

A fair rule is that nobody should be on a call before 8 am or after 9 pm. For a work meeting you may want to keep inside office hours, 9 am to 6 pm, but with three continents that is often impossible.

Step 3: find the overlap

Lay the acceptable hours of each place over one another. What remains is your window. These are worked out with the 8 am to 9 pm rule.

Notice how the window between India and New York is short and sits in the Indian evening and the New York morning. Add a third place and it can only stay the same or shrink.

Step 4: when there is no window

Some combinations have no fair hour at all. India with the west coast of America and Australia together is one. Then the honest choices are to take turns at the bad hour from one meeting to the next, to split into two calls, or to replace the call with a written update. Asking the same people to be up at midnight every week is how a team loses its goodwill.

Step 5: send it so that it cannot be misread

Write the time for each place, with the day and date. Add the UTC time once for anyone else. Avoid bare letters such as IST or CST, which mean different things in different countries. A calendar invitation is best of all, because each person's calendar shows it in their own time.

Step 6: check again when the clocks change

A weekly call fixed in January moves by an hour for the people whose clocks do not change when the others' do. For India this happens twice a year with Europe and twice with North America. The dates are on the clock changes page.

The converter does steps 1 to 3 for any set of places and any date, and shows the whole day in one table.