How to Schedule Meetings Across 5 Timezones
When your team spans more than four timezones, traditional timezone converters stop being useful. You can't mentally juggle five simultaneous offsets and find the intersection — the human brain isn't wired for it. This guide walks through a systematic approach to finding the best meeting slot for multi-timezone teams, with a worked example using five real cities, fairness strategies when there's no good overlap, and practical tools to make the process fast.
Why 5+ Timezones Is Qualitatively Different
With two or three timezones, there's usually at least some overlap during core working hours. Add a fourth or fifth timezone and the math gets brutal: the global spread of a truly distributed team can easily reach 14–18 hours. When one side's workday starts, the other side may already be asleep.
The honest truth about highly distributed teams is that there may be no single time slot where all five cities are simultaneously in core working hours. The goal shifts from "find the perfect slot" to "find the least-bad slot" and implement fairness mechanisms so the burden doesn't always fall on the same people.
Worked Example: New York, London, Dubai, Singapore, Sydney
Let's take a real five-city team spread across the globe and map out the full day. Here are the UTC offsets:
| City | UTC Offset | Standard Working Hours (UTC) |
|---|---|---|
| New York (EDT) | UTC–4 | 13:00–21:00 UTC |
| London (BST) | UTC+1 | 08:00–17:00 UTC |
| Dubai (GST) | UTC+4 | 05:00–14:00 UTC |
| Singapore (SGT) | UTC+8 | 01:00–10:00 UTC |
| Sydney (AEST) | UTC+10 | 23:00–08:00 UTC (next day) |
Now let's look at which UTC hours have the most cities in working hours simultaneously:
| UTC Hour | New York | London | Dubai | Singapore | Sydney | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 08:00 | 4 AM 😴 | 9 AM ✓ | 12 PM ✓ | 4 PM ✓ | 6 PM ✓ | 4/5 |
| 09:00 | 5 AM 😴 | 10 AM ✓ | 1 PM ✓ | 5 PM ✓ | 7 PM ~ | 3/5 |
| 13:00 | 9 AM ✓ | 2 PM ✓ | 5 PM ~ | 9 PM ~ | 11 PM 😴 | Best for NY+EU |
| 00:00 | 8 PM ✓ | 1 AM 😴 | 4 AM 😴 | 8 AM ✓ | 10 AM ✓ | 3/5 |
The brutal conclusion: there is no single hour when all five cities are simultaneously in core working hours. The best you can find is 4 out of 5 cities comfortable — and even then, Sydney or Singapore is often at the edges. This is normal and expected for a team spanning 14 time zones.
Step-by-Step: Finding Your Team's Best Slot
List every city with its UTC offset and the UTC hours that correspond to 9 AM–5 PM (or your team's actual working hours) in that city. Write them out on paper or use a tool like Overlap Timezone that shows this visually for all cities at once.
Scan across the 24-hour range. Any UTC hour where most of your cities overlap is a candidate. In the example above, 08:00 UTC has 4 out of 5 cities in working hours — that's your best mathematical result.
If someone has to take a call at 7 AM instead of 9 AM, that's a low cost. If they need to take it at 11 PM, that's high. Assign a discomfort score (0 = core hours, 1 = early/late, 2 = night) to each city for each candidate slot. Pick the slot with the lowest total score.
If no slot is good for everyone, rotate the inconvenience. Week 1: use the slot that's bad for Singapore. Week 2: use the slot that's bad for New York. No one person or timezone is always the one staying up late.
If the full-team meeting can't find a comfortable slot, consider whether you need everyone in the same call at the same time. A 5-timezone global all-hands might run monthly instead of weekly. Sub-regional meetings (APAC standup, EMEA sync) run more often and are less painful for participants.
Specific Strategies for Common 5-Timezone Combinations
US + Europe + India
India (IST, UTC+5:30) is positioned between Europe and Asia, making it the natural "bridge" timezone. The best all-hands slot for a US + UK + India team is 08:30–10:00 UTC, which puts New York at 3:30–5 AM (too early), London at 9:30–11 AM (ideal), and Mumbai at 2–3:30 PM (ideal). For the US side, this is before working hours — so either the US joins early or this is treated as an async-first update with the US reviewing a recording.
US + Europe + Southeast Asia
Singapore (UTC+8) and Bangkok (UTC+7) push the overlap window very early for European mornings. A workable compromise is 01:00–02:00 UTC, which is 9–10 PM New York (feasible for occasional evening calls), 2–3 AM London (too late), 9–10 AM Singapore (ideal). In practice, US+EU teams and APAC teams often run separate standups and share written summaries, with one monthly global all-hands that rotates its time slot.
US + Europe + Australia
Australia (UTC+10 or +11 AEDT) is one of the hardest combinations for a US West Coast team. The 19-hour gap between Los Angeles and Sydney means every meeting time is bad for someone. The most practical approach is bi-weekly rotating all-hands — one at a time that works for the US morning (which is Sydney evening), and one that works for Sydney morning (which is US evening). London sits in the middle and can join both.
The most sustainable model for teams spanning more than 12 hours is async-first communication with one or two live meetings per month that rotate their time, rather than weekly video calls that always disadvantage the same timezone.
Fairness Models for Distributed Teams
The Rotating Burden Model
Each team member (or each region) takes turns being the one who joins outside their working hours. If you have five timezones and rotate, each timezone takes an early or late meeting only once every five weeks. Keep a shared log of who had the inconvenient slot most recently.
The Asynchronous Anchor Model
Run all status updates, decisions, and non-urgent discussions asynchronously via written docs, Loom videos, or voice notes in Slack. Reserve live meetings for decisions that genuinely require real-time discussion. When you do meet live, rotate the time so no one carries a permanent burden.
The Follow-the-Sun Model
Used primarily by support and on-call engineering teams: each timezone hands off to the next when they reach end of day. The handoff meeting (15–30 minutes) occurs at the boundary between shifts. This requires well-defined handoff documentation but eliminates late-night or early-morning meetings entirely for most team members.
The Two-Region Model
For teams that span more than 12–14 hours, split into two regional groups with their own internal meetings, and schedule cross-regional meetings just once per week or fortnight. Each regional group runs independently most of the time and coordinates with the other region in writing, with a single weekly touch-point that rotates which region gets the inconvenient slot.
Tools That Make Multi-Timezone Scheduling Easier
- Overlap Timezone (this tool) — visual 24-hour grid for up to 10 cities simultaneously. Click any column to see everyone's exact local clock for that UTC hour and generate a meeting invite. Best for quickly finding and sharing the "green zone."
- Google Calendar — shows attendees' working hours on the event creation page when you invite them. Combine with UTC scheduling to avoid DST issues.
- Calendly or Cal.com — allows attendees in different timezones to pick slots that work for them from your available windows. Good for 1:1s across timezones.
- World Time Buddy — drag-and-drop multi-timezone comparison tool. Useful for ad-hoc scheduling but less visual than a grid approach.
- Loom or Notion — for async communication. Record a 5-minute walkthrough of a decision instead of calling a meeting; let the other timezone watch it during their morning.
Try Overlap Timezone with your own five cities and see the overlap window instantly. No signup, no account — just add your cities.
→ Open Overlap TimezoneSummary
Scheduling across five or more timezones requires accepting that there is likely no perfect slot and shifting your goal to "least-bad, most-fair." The systematic approach: map working hours to UTC for each city, find the UTC hours where the most cities overlap, score discomfort per slot, and apply a fairness rotation so the inconvenience is shared. For teams spanning more than 12–14 hours, an async-first communication model with infrequent rotating live meetings is often more sustainable than regular all-hands video calls that always penalise the same timezone.