Team planning
How to schedule a meeting across three time zones
With three locations, there may be no perfect overlap. The goal is not to discover a magic hour; it is to make the trade-off clear, repeatable and fair.
1. Use cities, not abbreviations
Ask each person for their city or IANA time zone, not only “PST”, “IST” or “CST”. Those abbreviations can be ambiguous and often hide daylight-saving changes. A city gives the calendar enough information to resolve the right local time for each future date.
2. Write down real availability
A nominal 09:00–17:00 day is only a starting point. One person may start early for school pickup, another may accept one evening a week, and a third may have a protected lunch. Put those limits into the meeting planner before looking for the overlap.
3. Decide what “fair” means
Fair can mean the least total inconvenience, a time inside working hours for the person who must make decisions, or a rotating burden across a recurring series. State the rule in the invite. Without a rule, teams often optimise for the person who sends the first calendar request rather than the people who attend it.
4. Check the next transition, then share
Test the selected hour today and again around the next daylight-saving change. Then share a link or invite description that lists all three local times and names the anchor city. This is more reliable than asking every attendee to do mental offset arithmetic from an acronym.