How to schedule international meetings

Deciding when to meet

• Start from each participant’s working day, not from a clock reading. A meeting at 8 AM in one city is only convenient if it is also inside someone else’s working hours.
• Where working hours overlap, any hour in that overlap works — pick the one nearest the middle so a small clock change does not push anyone outside it.
• Where they do not overlap, accept that someone is stretching and decide who, deliberately, rather than by default.
• Check the date against every participant’s public holidays before sending the invite — a time that works is still wrong on a day nobody is working.

A practical planning checklist

• List every participant’s city and confirm the meeting date.
• Set the real duration before comparing availability.
• Prefer overlap within normal weekday working hours.
• Check local weekends and public-holiday notices.
• If no good overlap exists, rotate early or late meetings over time.

Make the invitation unambiguous

Write the date, local time and time zone in the invitation. A calendar invitation is helpful, but a readable summary lets participants catch mistakes before the meeting.

Balance convenience and fairness

For two nearby time zones, a normal working-hours overlap is usually straightforward. With three continents, there may be no painless answer. Treat the recommended time as a starting point: identify who is being asked to join early or late, ask whether that is acceptable, and rotate the inconvenience for recurring meetings. A fair pattern is often more sustainable than forcing the same clock time every week.

Check the day, not only the hour

• Confirm the local weekday for every city.
• Review public-holiday notices before sending the invitation.
• Watch for meetings that cross midnight in one location.
• Allow for regional or company closures that a national calendar cannot know.

Create a clear meeting record

Share the Common Hours link with the invitation so participants can reopen the exact comparison. In the calendar description, include the meeting date, duration and a short list of local start times. Name the reference city only when useful; the local rows are what prevent confusion. If the meeting repeats, note who will absorb early or late hours next time.

Example: a three-continent team

Imagine participants in Los Angeles, New York and London. A late morning meeting in New York may be early in California and late afternoon in Britain. Adding a colleague in Mumbai changes the trade-off completely. Start with the recommended compromise, examine whose time falls outside the green working-hours area, and test the previous or next day for holiday differences. If no option is comfortable, shorten the meeting, split topics into two sessions, or alternate the difficult time among regions.

Questions to confirm with participants

• Is the displayed public holiday observed by this person or organization?
• Are the assumed 9-to-5 working hours appropriate for the team?
• Does anyone need travel, school-run or prayer-time accommodation?
• For a recurring series, how will early and late sessions be rotated?

Rotate the burden on recurring calls

Once a team spans more than about eight hours, someone is always outside normal working hours. A fixed weekly time means the same person absorbs that cost every week, which is a quiet and persistent source of resentment on distributed teams. Rotating the slot — early for the Americas one month, early for Asia-Pacific the next — spreads it. Write the rotation into the calendar invitation itself, so it is visible rather than remembered and a new joiner can see the arrangement is deliberate.

Working weeks are not the same everywhere

• Several Gulf states, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait, work Sunday to Thursday, so a Friday meeting excludes them entirely.
• Friday around midday is commonly reserved for prayer across much of the Muslim world.
• Israel also works Sunday to Thursday, with Friday a short day.
• France, Italy and Spain thin out sharply through August, and Japan does the same during Golden Week in late April and early May.
• Lunch in Spain and much of Latin America falls later than the noon-to-one that most scheduling tools quietly assume.

When there is genuinely no overlap

Some pairings have no shared working hours at all. California and India sit close to twelve hours apart, and no hour of the day suits both sides. The realistic options are worth naming plainly: rotate the inconvenience between the two regions, shorten the call so the cost is smaller, split it into two regional calls joined by a written handoff, or drop the meeting and move the decision into a document. A planner that offers the least-bad hour is still telling you something useful, but the honest answer is sometimes that a live meeting is the wrong format for this particular group.

Write an invitation that survives

• Give the date, the city and the local time together: “Tuesday 14 April, 9:00 AM New York” leaves nothing to interpret.
• Send a calendar invitation with a real time zone attached, so each participant’s own client performs the conversion.
• Avoid writing “EST” in summer — the correct abbreviation is then EDT, and the two are an hour apart.
• State the finish time as well as the start, so nobody discovers the overrun only once it happens.
• For a recurring series, say which city is the anchor and warn that the others will drift around it.