Arranging a meeting across time zones

Inside one company, Outlook or Google Calendar finds a slot and sends the invitation. It gets harder with a client on another system, a club or charity, or family in three countries, and when an invitation turns up at 3am. These tools pick the time, share it with anyone and check invitations that look wrong.

1. Find an hour that works

Add each place to World Clock and set the Date to the day of the meeting, not today. Each place is a row of hours with working hours shaded, so the slot that suits everyone is where the shading lines up. Drag across the hours to choose the meeting.

The date matters because clocks change on different days. The US moves its clocks two or three weeks before Europe in March, and a week after it at the end of October, so for those weeks New York is an hour closer to London than usual. Australia changes the other way, in October and April, and India, China and Japan don’t change at all. The list under the grid shows every change in the next eight weeks.

2. Share it with people outside your calendar

World Clock’s buttons under the chosen time each suit a different kind of message:

• Copy text gives a line for each place, such as New York: Tue 20 Oct, 09:00–10:00 UTC−4, to paste into an email or chat.
• Copy image or Save image gives a picture of everyone’s day with the meeting outlined, which shows at a glance that it’s early for one person and late for another.
• Copy a link to this input, at the top of the page, opens the same places, date and hours for whoever clicks it, so they can suggest a better hour.
• The Add to links and Save .ics put it in a calendar once it’s agreed (step 3).

In the text, name cities rather than abbreviations. IST is India, Ireland or Israel, CST is China or the central US, and EST is wrong for half the year, when New York is on EDT.

3. Send it to their calendars

Give the meeting a title and use the Add to Google Calendar, Add to Outlook.com and Add to Outlook (work or school) links. Each opens the meeting ready to save in that calendar, at the right time for wherever it’s opened, with every place’s time in the notes. Apple Calendar has no link like this, so attach the file from Save .ics as well: every calendar app can open it.

For a regular meeting, a public event or a newsletter, Calendar Invite makes the same links and file with a repeat and a reminder. Only the .ics file keeps the reminder, and Outlook’s link drops the repeat.

A repeating meeting stays at the same clock time in its organiser’s time zone. When the organiser’s clocks change, everyone else’s time moves, so pick the organiser’s zone with care (or UTC, when no one should be favoured).

4. When an invitation shows the wrong time

Save the invitation’s .ics attachment and open it in Calendar Invite. It shows the time in the sender’s time zone and in yours, so you can see whether the invitation or your calendar is wrong. Common causes:

• The times have no time zone. Calendar Invite says so, and every calendar then shows the same clock time wherever it is, so 10:00 for the sender is 10:00 for you too.
• A time zone the calendar doesn’t know. Outlook writes Windows names such as Eastern Standard Time, which some calendars misread. Calendar Invite understands them and shows what the time should be.
• Your calendar is set to the wrong zone, often after travelling: the invitation reads correctly here but not in your calendar.

It also shows who has accepted, how a series repeats with its next dates, and whether the file is an update or a cancellation.

5. Series and deadlines

Date Calculator answers the questions around a meeting: how many weeks there are until the end of March for a fortnightly series, the date ten business days from now, or which ISO week number a date is in, which many European teams plan by. Business days skip weekends but not public holidays, which differ from country to country.