Meeting Planning
The Complete International Meeting Planning Guide
A step-by-step method for scheduling meetings that work across countries without anyone losing sleep.
· 7 min read
Scheduling a meeting across three or more countries is a small optimisation problem. Here is a repeatable method that gets you a fair, workable slot every time.
Step 1 — List everyone in UTC
Convert each participant’s working hours into UTC. Now you can compare them on a single axis instead of juggling offsets in your head.
Step 2 — Find the overlap
Look for the window where everyone’s working hours intersect. With wide spreads — say India to US West — the overlap may be only an hour or two, often early morning for one side and evening for the other.
Step 3 — Share the load
If there is no comfortable overlap, decide who takes the inconvenient hour, and rotate it across recurring meetings so it is not always the same region.
Step 4 — Confirm in local time
Send the invite with each person’s local time spelled out, and check that the date is right — a 9pm meeting in California is already "tomorrow" in Sydney.
Step 5 — Account for holidays
Before locking a date, check public holidays in each region. A perfect time slot is useless if half the attendees are on a national holiday.