Best practices for international meeting planning

How to find reasonable overlap between working hours in different cities and time zones.

Answer first

Good international meeting planning starts with overlap windows, not with one person’s local clock.

The clean way to plan meetings across cities is to anchor the reference in UTC, identify the working-hour overlap, then convert into local time for participants.

That process reduces DST surprises and makes meeting schedules easier to document, rotate, and audit.

Best anchor time

UTC

First planning step

Find overlap window

Biggest recurring risk

DST drift

Best supporting tool

Meeting planner + compare pages

What to optimize for

Aim for sustainable overlap, not just a technically possible meeting time. The best schedule preserves focus hours and spreads inconvenience fairly when teams are far apart.

Operational checklist

Before locking a recurring meeting, verify the current time difference, verify DST behavior for both locations, and decide whether the meeting is fixed to UTC or fixed to one office’s local time.

Confirm the current time difference
Check DST behavior for both locations
Decide whether the schedule is UTC-fixed or local-fixed
Document the chosen reference in the invite

Frequently asked questions

Should recurring international meetings be scheduled in UTC?

Usually yes. Anchoring the schedule in UTC makes the rule explicit and reduces ambiguity when local DST rules change.

Why do recurring meetings drift during the year?

Because one or both locations may enter or leave daylight saving time on different dates, changing the effective local offset.