Booking a call with someone in another country sounds simple until you try it. Their morning is your evening, someone is always on the wrong side of midnight, and twice a year the gap quietly changes by an hour. This guide shows how to find a time that works, which city pairs have no good time at all, and how to send an invite nobody can misread.
Step 1: find the overlap
Write down each person’s working hours in their own time — usually 9am to 5pm. Then line them up on one clock. The hours where everyone is at work are your overlap. That’s where the meeting should go.
For two cities five hours apart, like New York and London, it looks like this:
| New York | London | |
|---|---|---|
| 8am | 1pm | Too early in New York |
| 9am | 2pm | Both at work ✓ |
| 10am | 3pm | Both at work ✓ |
| 11am | 4pm | Both at work ✓ |
| 12pm | 5pm | London is finishing |
| 1pm | 6pm | Too late in London |
Three good hours. With three or more cities, the overlap shrinks fast. That’s why it helps to see everyone’s clock side by side — the time zone meeting planner colours each person’s row green, amber or red so you can spot the overlap at a glance.
How much overlap common city pairs have
Assuming everyone works 9am–5pm, for most of the year:
| Cities | Time difference | Shared working hours |
|---|---|---|
| New York – San Francisco | 3 hours | 5 hours: 12pm–5pm New York (9am–2pm San Francisco) |
| New York – London | 5 hours | 3 hours: 9am–12pm New York (2pm–5pm London) |
| New York – Berlin or Paris | 6 hours | 2 hours: 9am–11am New York (3pm–5pm Berlin) |
| London – India | 4½ hours (UK summer) or 5½ (UK winter) | 2½–3½ hours: London morning, India afternoon |
| San Francisco – London | 8 hours | None. 8am San Francisco is 4pm London — the usual compromise. |
| New York – India | 9½ or 10½ hours | None. 8am New York is 5:30pm or 6:30pm in India. |
| New York – Sydney | 14 to 16 hours | None, and it’s a different day. Late afternoon in New York is the next morning in Sydney. |
Step 2: when there’s no overlap, be fair about it
Some teams simply don’t share a working hour. A few ways to handle it:
- Use the edges of the day. An 8am start for one person and a 5pm finish for the other is usually better than anyone joining at 10pm.
- Take turns. For a weekly meeting, swap who gets the awkward time each week or each month, so the same person isn’t always on at midnight.
- Ask whether it needs to be live. A short recorded video or a written update can replace a meeting that only shares news.
- Watch for the date line. Between the Americas and Asia or Australia, a Monday afternoon call is already Tuesday for the other side. A “Friday” meeting can land on their Saturday.
Step 3: check the date, because clocks change
Many countries move their clocks forward an hour in spring and back in autumn (daylight saving time). The catch is that they don’t all do it on the same day.
| Where | Clocks go forward | Clocks go back |
|---|---|---|
| US and Canada | 2nd Sunday in March | 1st Sunday in November |
| UK and most of Europe | Last Sunday in March | Last Sunday in October |
| Sydney, Melbourne (southern Australia) | 1st Sunday in October | 1st Sunday in April |
| India, China, Japan, Singapore, most of Africa, Arizona, Queensland | Never change | |
So for two or three weeks in March, and one week around the start of November, the US has changed and Europe hasn’t. New York and London are four hours apart instead of five. A recurring 10am New York call that normally lands at 3pm in London lands at 2pm instead.
Australia is the other way round: its summer is the northern winter. The gap between London and Sydney swings between 9 and 11 hours across the year.
The safe habit is to check the time for the actual date of the meeting, not today. The meeting planner does this for whichever date you pick, so it stays right even in those odd weeks.
Step 4: send an invite nobody can misread
- Name the city, not just the letters. “3pm London / 10am New York” is clear. “10am EST” is wrong for most of the year: in summer New York is on EDT, an hour different. “Eastern time” or “New York time” is always right.
- Avoid “12pm” and “12am”. People mix them up. Write “noon” or “midnight”, or use the 24-hour clock: 12:00 and 00:00.
- Say the day for everyone when it differs. “Monday 5pm New York — Tuesday 9am Sydney.”
- Send a calendar invite, not just a message. A proper invite carries the exact moment of the meeting, and each person’s calendar shows it in their own time automatically. You can make one with the calendar invite (.ics) maker, or download one straight from the meeting planner.
- Share the comparison. A link showing the time on everyone’s clock settles “wait, is that my morning or evening?” before anyone asks.
A quick checklist
- Everyone’s city added — not just “Europe” or “Asia”.
- Checked on the meeting’s real date, not today.
- Nobody is booked before 8am or after 6pm unless they agreed to it.
- Any “+1 day” flagged in the invite.
- For a recurring meeting: a note that the time may shift by an hour in March and around November.