Finding a meeting time that works across three continents

Two time zones is a search problem. Three is a fairness problem. Once the spread between the earliest and latest participant passes about ten hours, there is no hour of the day that is comfortable for everyone, and the meeting stops being a matter of finding the right slot. It becomes a matter of deciding, openly, who is going to be inconvenienced and how often.

First, measure the spread

Take the offsets from UTC for each participant on the date of the meeting, not today's, and subtract the smallest from the largest. Under about eight hours there is usually a genuine overlap in normal working hours. Between eight and twelve, someone is taking an early breakfast or a late evening. Beyond about fourteen, someone is being asked to work at night, and no arrangement of the meeting changes that.

The meeting planner lays this out as a grid so the overlap is visible rather than something you compute in your head. What it cannot decide for you is the second half of the problem.

Second, decide whose day gets bent

There are only a few honest options, and they are all defensible if chosen deliberately.

• Rotate. The awkward slot moves between regions on a schedule everyone can see. This is the fairest arrangement and the hardest to sustain, because it needs someone to keep the rota honest.
• Fix it on the smallest group. If one person is in Auckland and eleven are in Europe, moving eleven calendars to spare one is a poor trade. Say so out loud, and make the cost back another way, such as giving that person the agenda and the recording first.
• Split the meeting. Two shorter regional calls with a shared written summary often beat one call at which a third of the room is asleep and silent.
• Do not meet. A written thread with a deadline is a legitimate answer for anything that is not a decision or a disagreement.

Third, protect the edges

Before you fix an hour, agree what is off limits. A common rule that survives contact with reality is: nothing before 07:00 or after 21:00 local for anyone, no exceptions for seniority. That single constraint removes most of the argument, because it turns an open-ended negotiation into a search over a much smaller space, and it is easy to check.

Remember that the working day itself is not the same everywhere. In parts of southern Europe and Latin America the afternoon starts later and runs later. In much of the Gulf the working week is Sunday to Thursday, so a Friday slot that looks ordinary from Berlin lands on a weekend elsewhere. Public holidays are local and rarely appear on anyone else's calendar.

Fourth, publish the moment, not your clock

When you send the invitation, send it as a calendar event with a real time zone attached, so every recipient sees their own local reading. If you must write the time in prose, give at least two anchors: "16:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin, 12:00 New York, 01:00 next day Tokyo)". The next-day marker matters more than people expect: a meeting that crosses midnight for one participant lands on a different date in their calendar, and "Tuesday's call" is then genuinely ambiguous.

Fifth, revisit it twice a year

A recurring meeting fixed in one region's local time drifts for everyone else at each clock change, and the drift is invisible to whoever set it up. Put a reminder in March and October to check the grid again. It takes a minute and saves the recurring conversation about why the call feels an hour wrong for a fortnight.