How to schedule meetings across time zones without annoying anyone

Most scheduling mistakes between countries are not caused by arithmetic. They happen because the other person's day looks different from yours: they are at lunch, it is a national holiday, or their weekend starts on a different day. A few habits remove most of the friction.

1. Start from the overlap, not from your own calendar. Write down each person's normal working window in local time, then find the hours where all windows overlap. With teams spread across Asia and North America, the overlap is often a single slot early in one region's morning and late in the other's evening. Decide who takes the inconvenient hour and rotate it, so the same people are not always the ones joining at 7 AM or 9 PM.

2. Check holidays before you propose a date. A meeting that looks perfect on your calendar can land on a day when the whole country is off. Check the next two or three weeks for every participant's location, not only the day you have in mind, because many holidays come with extra days off around them.

3. Respect lunch. A typical lunch break falls around noon local time, and in some countries it is longer and more protected than elsewhere. Avoid proposing a slot that begins or ends in the middle of the other side's lunch hour.

4. Do not assume everyone's weekend is Saturday and Sunday. Several countries observe a Friday and Saturday weekend, and a few use other patterns. A Friday afternoon proposal can be a day off for someone and a Sunday proposal can be a normal working day.

5. Always state the time zone in writing. Write the time in both zones, for example "Tue 10:00 Seoul / Mon 21:00 New York", and include the date for each. Mentioning the date on both sides prevents the classic one-day-off error when one location is already tomorrow.

6. Watch for daylight saving changes. Clocks change on different dates in different places, and some regions do not change at all. The gap between two cities can therefore shift by an hour for a few weeks each year. Re-check recurring meetings around those dates.