Guide

How to Find a Meeting Time That Works Across Time Zones

Published August 2026

If your team spans more than two time zones, "just find a time that works" quietly turns into fifteen messages and someone still ends up joining at 6am. Here's a faster way to do it.

1. List every time zone, not every city

Start by converting your team list into time zones rather than cities — two people in different cities can share the same offset, which immediately simplifies the problem. This matters more than it sounds: a six-person team often collapses into three or four actual time zones once you group them.

2. Find each person's real working hours, not a guess

Default working hours (9am–6pm) are a reasonable starting assumption, but people's actual availability varies — school pickups, gym schedules, or simply preferring not to take calls before 10am. Where you can, use each person's stated availability rather than assuming a uniform day.

3. Look for the overlap, not the average

A common mistake is picking a time that's the mathematical midpoint between everyone's day — this often lands outside working hours for at least one person. Instead, look for the actual window where every included time zone is simultaneously inside working hours. This is exactly what an overlap-based time zone overlap tool calculates automatically, instead of you doing it by hand across multiple tabs.

4. When there's no full overlap, rotate the pain

Some team combinations — for example, US West Coast paired with parts of Asia — genuinely have little or no shared working-hour window. In that case, the fairest approach is usually to rotate meeting times so the same person or region isn't always the one joining early or late. See our guide on best overlap hours for common remote team regions for typical windows by pairing.

5. Confirm the exact date, not just the time

Daylight saving transitions don't happen on the same date everywhere. A meeting time that works one week can shift by an hour for one participant the next, if their region changes clocks and another region doesn't. Always double-check the specific date when scheduling near a DST changeover — see our async work and overlap hours guide for more on planning around this.