Trying to hold three local clocks in your head is how meetings end up at 5 AM. The reliable method is to convert each person's working hours into one reference, UTC, and look at where the windows overlap. Take a team in Vancouver, London and Seoul planning a call for Thursday, 15 October 2026, with everyone working 9:00 to 17:00 local time.
Lined up, the three windows tile the 24-hour day with no overlap at all. Seoul's day ends at 08:00 UTC exactly as London's begins, London's ends at 16:00 UTC as Vancouver's begins, and Vancouver's ends at midnight UTC as Seoul's next day begins. There is no time at which all three are at their desks. That is not a scheduling failure; it is geography, and the first job of a planner is to show it clearly so the conversation can move to the real question.
Since no slot works for everyone inside office hours, someone has to take an early or a late call. Each candidate is one UTC instant; the only thing that changes is who pays.
Of these, 14:00 UTC is the only one that merely stretches two people rather than breaking one. If the call is weekly, the fair arrangement is to rotate: alternate 14:00 UTC with a Seoul-friendly pairing, or move the Seoul person's stretch to a two-person sync so they are not up at 11 PM every week. Write the rotation down; nobody remembers whose turn it is.
The meeting planner does the same arithmetic for every half-hour of the day and ranks the results. Its city list has 13 entries, so stand in with a city that keeps the same clock all year: Los Angeles for Vancouver and Tokyo for Seoul (London is listed). Add the three participants with the hours they are willing to work, not the hours they would like to: Los Angeles 07:00–17:00, London 09:00–17:00, Tokyo 09:00–23:00. Set the date to 2026-10-15 and the duration to 1 hour.
With a browser in Vancouver, the top suggestion is 7:00 AM, with each participant's row showing 3:00 PM for London and 11:00 PM for Tokyo. It is rated "good" rather than "excellent": the planner reserves "excellent" for slots where everyone is between 10:00 and 15:59 local time, which a stretched slot can never achieve. Two details worth knowing: only the start time is scored, so check the end time yourself for long meetings, and the work-end hour is inclusive, so someone working until 17:00 counts as free for a call that starts at 17:00. Add to Calendar opens a Google Calendar event with the participants listed in the description; rename it from "Team Meeting" before you save.
Korea does not change its clocks. The UK and the EU end summer time on 25 October 2026; the US and Canada end it a week later on 1 November 2026. A weekly meeting agreed in October therefore moves for somebody in November, and which person moves depends on whose calendar the recurring event is anchored to.
Suppose the series is anchored to Vancouver at 7:00 AM:
Anchor it to London at 3:00 PM instead and Seoul lands on midnight from 29 October, while Vancouver moves to 8:00 AM for a week and then back to 7:00. Anchor it to Seoul at 11:00 PM and the Western participants absorb the shift: Vancouver goes to 6:00 AM in November. Whoever owns the anchor keeps their time; everyone else moves. Decide that deliberately, and re-run the planner for the first week after each change. The dates to watch are 25 October and 1 November 2026, then 14 March, 28 March, 31 October and 7 November 2027. Australia runs the other way, starting summer time on 4 October 2026 and ending it on 4 April 2027.
For the general habits of a distributed team, see how to schedule meetings across time zones. For this particular problem, three cities whose days do not overlap, the answer is always the same: lay the hours out in UTC, pick the least painful instant, rotate the pain, and re-check in the week after the clocks change.
Open the free meeting planner — add each participant's city and hours and read the ranked slots in your own local time.
Pick a listed city that keeps the same clock all year round: Los Angeles for Vancouver, Tokyo for Seoul, New York for Toronto, Paris for Berlin. Avoid pairs that only match in one season, such as Denver for Phoenix.
Yes. It converts each participant with the time zone rules for the date you enter, so the same three cities get different suggestions on 15 October and 5 November 2026. That is why you should re-run it for the first meeting after each clock change.
The headline time of each suggestion uses your device’s time zone so you can read it as your own local time. The row under it shows the same moment on each participant’s clock.
No. On a normal day the three working windows cover 00:00–08:00, 08:00–16:00 and 16:00–24:00 UTC with no overlap. Someone has to take an early or late call; 14:00 UTC (7 AM Vancouver, 3 PM London, 11 PM Seoul) is the least disruptive single slot.