A team in Berlin, clients in New York, developers in Bangalore: for distributed teams the clock is often the biggest obstacle. Set appointments by gut feeling and you catch colleagues in California at 6 a.m. or those in Tokyo after hours. With a few rules you can find the best time window and share inconvenient times fairly.
Step 1: find the overlap in working hours
First, look for shared working hours. Convert each location's usual working hours into a common time, for example German time, and find the intersection. With 9-to-5 at every location and a date in winter, this gives:
| Locations | Shared time window (German time) |
|---|---|
| Berlin + London | 10:00–17:00 |
| Berlin + New Delhi | 09:00–12:30 |
| Berlin + São Paulo | 13:00–17:00 |
| Berlin + New York | 15:00–17:00 |
| Berlin + Singapore | 09:00–10:00 |
| Berlin + Tokyo | none (with 8–18: 08:00–10:00) |
| Berlin + Los Angeles | none (with 8–18: 17:00–18:00) |
| Berlin + Sydney | none |
As of 1 December 2026, calculated with the meeting planner. In summer the windows to countries without daylight saving time shift by one hour: with Tokyo there is then one hour even with 9-to-5 (9:00 to 10:00 German time).
The meeting planner does this for up to four locations: it checks the day in 15-minute steps, shows every matching window and suggests the slot with the largest buffer to the start and end of the working day.
Step 2: when there is no overlap
Berlin, New York and Tokyo share no working hours: when Tokyo finishes work, it is the middle of the night in New York. Then there are three options:
- A compromise at the edge of working hours: a meeting at 12:00 German time is 6:00 in New York and 20:00 in Tokyo in winter. Two locations are outside office hours, but nobody is in the middle of the night. The meeting planner suggests this fairest compromise when there is no shared window.
- Two meetings instead of one: Berlin–Tokyo in the morning, Berlin–New York in the afternoon. Berlin acts as the bridge and passes results on.
- Work asynchronously: instead of a meeting, a written update or a video recording, with questions answered in comments. For status meetings in particular this saves everyone time.
Step 3: share inconvenient slots fairly
If a recurring meeting always falls early in the morning or late at night for one location, that team carries the burden alone. Rotation is fairer: the slot moves, for example monthly, so that every location sometimes has a convenient and sometimes an inconvenient time. It is important that decisions are not made only in the meetings one location misses.
Step 4: invite correctly
- State the time zone: do not write "3 p.m." in invitations but "15:00 CET (UTC+1)" or "15:00 Berlin". Even clearer is the ISO 8601 notation with offset: 2026-12-01T15:00+01:00.
- Calendar invitation instead of text: a calendar entry stores the moment internally in UTC and shows it to every recipient in their local time.
- Choose the organiser's time zone deliberately: recurring appointments follow the time zone they were created in. Create them in the time zone of the team for which the time should stay fixed.
- Check the transition weeks: between the 2nd and last Sunday in March and from late October to early November, New York is only 5 instead of 6 hours behind Germany. A meeting at 15:00 German time is then at 10:00 instead of 9:00 in New York. Details in Time difference Germany–USA.
- Watch for the weekend: Friday afternoon in the USA is already Saturday in Asia and Australia. The meeting planner flags locations where the slot falls on a weekend.
Step 5: keep working time and rest in view
Meetings late in the evening or early in the morning count as working time in Germany. The German Working Hours Act generally requires an uninterrupted rest period of at least eleven hours after the end of the daily working time (§ 5 ArbZG). If you have a meeting with California at 22:00, you should not be back at your desk at 8:00 the next morning. The working hours calculator adds up your hours.
Conclusion
Good meetings across time zones start with the overlap in working hours. If there is none, edge times, separate meetings or asynchronous work help, and inconvenient times should rotate. Always send invitations with a time zone and keep an eye on the weeks around the clock changes. The meeting planner finds the right slot for your team.
Sources: ISO 8601 (representation of dates and times); German Working Hours Act (ArbZG) § 5; IANA Time Zone Database. As of October 2026.