4 min read · Time
Most time zone mix-ups come from the same few habits: writing a zone abbreviation that is wrong half the year, forgetting that countries change clocks on different dates, and always making the same team take the late call.
Find the overlap first
List each participant’s working hours in their own time zone, then look for the hours that overlap. New York and London share about four working hours (New York mornings). San Francisco and London share about an hour, or none. The US and India have little or no shared workday, so someone has to start early or stay late.
A meeting planner that shows everyone’s local hours side by side makes this a one-minute job instead of mental math.
Write the time so it can’t be misread
Send a calendar invite rather than a time in the message text. Calendar apps convert the time into each guest’s local zone automatically.
When you do write a time, give the zone by city or as a UTC offset: “3:00 PM New York (UTC−4)”. Avoid “EST” in summer: New York is on EDT from March to November, and “EST” is technically an hour off.
For global teams, add the time in UTC as a neutral reference that never changes for daylight saving.
Watch the daylight saving gap weeks
The US moves its clocks in the second week of March and the first week of November. Europe moves on the last Sunday of March and the last Sunday of October. For two or three weeks each spring and about a week each fall, the gap between New York and London is four hours instead of five.
Recurring meetings set in one zone will shift by an hour for the other side during those weeks. Australia and New Zealand change clocks in the opposite season, so gaps with them change by up to two hours through the year.
Share the pain
If there is no comfortable overlap, rotate the inconvenient slot so the same people are not always on at 7 AM or 9 PM. Record the meeting, and keep a short written summary for anyone who can’t attend.
Try it yourself
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