How to Find the Best Meeting Time for a Distributed Team
Five time zones, ten people, and a meeting that needs to happen. Here is how to calculate the overlap window, and what to do when there is none.
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Why it is harder than it sounds
Scheduling a meeting across two time zones is straightforward. Scheduling across five is a constraint-satisfaction problem. Each person has working hours. Those working hours, translated to a common reference point (UTC), must overlap for a meeting to be possible. As the number of time zones increases, the overlap window narrows, and sometimes disappears entirely. The additional complexity: some team members have hard constraints (school pickup at 3pm, religious observance, local statutory hours), and these constraints are not always visible to the meeting organizer. The result is a meeting that works on paper but not in practice.
"Five time zones. Ten people. 'When works for everyone?' is a question that takes 15 minutes to answer manually and 30 seconds to answer with the right tool."
How to calculate the overlap window manually
The manual method: 1. List each team member's working hours in local time 2. Convert each person's working hours to UTC 3. Find the time range where all UTC windows overlap 4. Convert that overlap range back to local time for verification Formula: Overlap start = max(all UTC start times). Overlap end = min(all UTC end times). If overlap end ≤ overlap start, there is no overlap. This calculation works. It takes 10–15 minutes per meeting, every time. For teams scheduling 3–5 cross-timezone meetings per week, this is 30–75 minutes per week of pure scheduling overhead.
Worked example: 10-person team across 5 time zones
Team: Kyiv (UTC+3), Warsaw (UTC+2), Lisbon (UTC+1), Toronto (UTC-4), and Vancouver (UTC-7). Standard working hours 09:00–18:00 local. Converted to UTC: - Kyiv: 06:00–15:00 - Warsaw: 07:00–16:00 - Lisbon: 08:00–17:00 - Toronto: 13:00–22:00 - Vancouver: 16:00–01:00 Overlap start: max(06, 07, 08, 13, 16) = 16:00 UTC Overlap end: min(15, 16, 17, 22, 01) = 15:00 UTC Overlap end (15:00) is earlier than overlap start (16:00). There is no overlap window. This 10-person team across 5 time zones has zero shared working hours.
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What to do when the overlap window is zero
When there is no overlap, three options exist:
- Segment by region, run two meetings: one for EU team, one for North America team. Share a written summary across both.
- Rotate meeting times, alternate who takes the inconvenient slot. Document the rotation so it is visible and fair.
- Move to async-first, replace the meeting with a structured async format: a shared document with questions, a 24-hour comment window, and a decision recorded in writing.
Remote Team Scheduler: automatic overlap detection
The Remote Team Scheduler in Melororium stores each team member's timezone and working hours in their employee profile. When scheduling a meeting, the system calculates the overlap window automatically, no manual UTC conversion required. The scheduler displays each team member's local time alongside the proposed meeting time, so the organizer can see immediately whether the proposed time falls within each person's working hours. Conflicts are flagged before the invite is sent.
Protecting the overlap window
For teams with a small overlap window (1–2 hours), that window should be treated as protected time. Meetings scheduled in the overlap window take priority; individual-timezone work is scheduled outside it. This requires intentional team agreements: the overlap window is for collaboration, not for focus work. Both sides of the team need to hold that time available, otherwise the meeting that requires everyone ends up unable to fit within the window that theoretically exists.
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