Planning guide

Timezone meeting planning guide

Use this when you need one meeting time that survives daylight saving time, remote teams, and calendar sharing.

Start from one base instant

Pick one UTC instant first, then map it into each attendee timezone. This avoids comparing local wall times that look equal but mean different instants.

Store the timezone, not just the offset

Use IANA zones like Europe/London or Asia/Tokyo. A fixed offset cannot tell you when DST shifts will change the local hour.

Watch the overlap window

A daily 09:00–18:00 overlap is usually the safest default for distributed teams. Use a board or planner to see which cities fit the same working window.

Practical checklist

  • Confirm the calendar invite uses the correct timezone and not just a browser-local default.
  • If the meeting repeats, store the rule and timezone together so DST changes recalculate correctly.
  • Share the final time as a link or ICS file, not only as plain text.
  • For cross-region teams, compare at least two candidate times before locking the invite.

Common work corridors

Start from a proven route, compare the current offset, open the same cities in the meeting planner, then hand off to a calendar link when the slot is agreed.

Useful tools

Next steps

Turn this guide into an action