To find the best time to meet across time zones, map the window where everyone’s local hours overlap — roughly 8am to 9pm in each zone — propose options inside it, show every person those options in their own local time, and let the group vote. The highest-scoring slot is your fairest meeting time.

Step 1: Map the civil overlap window

Start by finding the hours that are civilized everywhere. A useful rule of thumb: treat roughly 8am–9pm local time as acceptable for each participant, then look for where those ranges intersect.

  1. List every zone represented — the zones, not the people. Ten attendees in three zones is a three-zone problem.
  2. Convert each zone’s 8am–9pm into one reference zone (yours is fine). New York’s 8am–9pm and London’s 8am–9pm overlap from 8am to 4pm New York time, for example.
  3. Intersect the ranges. Whatever remains is your candidate window. Two or three zones usually leave several workable hours; add Sydney to San Francisco and the window can shrink to almost nothing.

If the intersection is empty, no tool can conjure a painless hour — someone will stretch. Your job shifts from finding the perfect time to sharing the discomfort deliberately, which is what Step 3 is for.

Step 2: Present every option in local time

The single biggest source of missed international meetings is the sentence “let’s do 2pm” — with no zone, or with a zone half the group silently converts wrong. Fix it by never asking anyone to convert:

  • Use a tool that localizes automatically. A scheduling poll that detects each participant’s time zone shows your “2pm Tuesday” as “7pm Tuesday” in London and “6am Wednesday” in Auckland — each person votes on what they’ll actually experience.
  • Offer options from different parts of the window, so the vote reveals whether the group leans early or late, instead of you guessing.
  • Let the vote decide. With yes/maybe/no answers on each option, a confident yes outweighs a grudging maybe, and the genuinely best slot — not the loudest suggestion — rises to the top.

Step 3: Rotate the pain for recurring meetings

For a one-off call, the winning slot is the answer. For a weekly or monthly meeting, the same winning slot means the same person eats a 6am call forever. Build in fairness rotation: alternate between two or three slots so the inconvenient hour moves around the map, and re-poll every quarter or when someone joins or moves — the best time changes when the group does.

Common mistakes to avoid

  • Ignoring daylight saving time. DST shifts on different dates in different countries — a slot that worked in October can quietly break in November. Localized options absorb this automatically; mental math doesn’t.
  • Saying “2pm” without a zone — or worse, with an ambiguous abbreviation. There are multiple time zones that call themselves CST.
  • Optimizing for headquarters. If the same remote person is always the one at midnight, your “best time” is just the majority’s best time.
  • Forgetting the date line. Your Tuesday afternoon can be someone else’s Wednesday morning — always show the day, not just the hour.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best time to schedule a meeting between the US and Europe?

Morning in the US and late afternoon in Europe is the classic overlap — roughly 8–11am Eastern, which lands early-to-mid evening across most of Europe. Confirm with a poll rather than assuming, since individual schedules vary more than time zones do.

How do I schedule a meeting across time zones without doing the math?

Use a scheduling poll that shows each participant the options in their own local time. You create options once in your zone; everyone else sees their zone. Nobody converts anything, so nobody converts anything wrong.

What happens to my meeting time when daylight saving time changes?

If your meeting is pinned to one zone, it moves for everyone else when that zone shifts — and different countries shift on different dates. Re-check recurring meetings around DST transitions, or re-run a quick poll for the affected weeks.

Meeting Time handles the hard parts of this method for you: every option is shown in each participant’s own time zone automatically, voting is a tap, and a response deadline keeps the poll from drifting across the international date line. It’s free to start, participants never create accounts, and the fairest time rises to the top on its own.