How to Schedule Meetings Across Multiple Time Zones

Distributed teams routinely span 8, 12, or even 16 hours of time difference. Scheduling well means accepting that a single meeting time will never be equally convenient for everyone — the goal is to minimize pain and distribute it fairly.

Find the Real Overlap

Start by mapping each team member's standard working hours (commonly 9:00 AM–6:00 PM local) onto a single day. The overlapping window — where the largest number of people are inside working hours simultaneously — is your best meeting slot. For teams split across, say, Karachi and Seattle, that overlap can be as narrow as one or two hours, typically Pakistan's evening against the US west coast's morning.

Rotate the Pain Fairly

When there's no comfortable overlap at all, rotate meeting times so the same group isn't always the one waking up early or staying up late. A simple every-other-week rotation between two inconvenient slots is far more sustainable than permanently favoring one region.

Tools That Help

• A shared team calendar with each person's local time zone attached to their profile.
• A world-clock widget pinned somewhere visible during async planning.
• This site's Compare Time tool for one-off scheduling across three or more locations, including a working-hours overlap indicator.

Async-First as a Default

For teams spanning more than about 8 hours of difference, treat synchronous meetings as the exception rather than the default. Write decisions down, record important meetings, and give people a day to respond asynchronously before requiring a live call.

Frequently Asked Questions

There's no hard rule, but once the overlap in standard working hours drops below two or three hours, most teams find synchronous-by-default collaboration starts to break down.

It's simpler, but it consistently disadvantages the same people. Rotating inconvenient slots, or defaulting to UTC in writing, is fairer over time.