How do you schedule a call with someone in a different time zone?
It is 2 pm for you and already midnight for them. Setting a call across time zones comes down to four checks and one habit: write the time on both sides.
Start with the offset on the day of the call
The gap between two cities is not a constant. It changes when either country moves its clocks, and they do not all move on the same day: Europe changes on the last Sunday of March and the last Sunday of October, while the United States and Canada change on the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November. For a few weeks each year, the usual gap between London and New York is an hour smaller than you expect.
Other traps: some places never use daylight saving (Japan and India, for instance), some have offsets of 30 or 45 minutes (India is UTC+5:30), and a few countries shift their clocks on irregular dates, as Morocco does around Ramadan. Always work out the offset for the exact day of the call.
Write the time on both sides
One sentence prevents most errors: “Friday 3 pm my time, so 8 pm yours.” It makes each person check, and the other can correct you at once. Add the city (“3 pm in London”) rather than just an abbreviation: EST, IST or CST can mean different things in different places.
If you write in 24-hour time and the other person uses am and pm, spell it out: “15:00 (3 pm)”. And watch for the date line: 11 pm on Thursday in London is already Friday morning in Tokyo.
Find a slot that is nobody’s night
Between distant cities, the shared comfortable window is narrow. Decide first what counts as reasonable for each of you, say 8 am to 10 pm, then look for the overlap. London and New York leave a good stretch in the afternoon and evening for the UK; London and Sydney leave only early morning in the UK against late afternoon or evening in Australia.
When there is no shared slot at all, alternate: early for one of you this time, late for the other next time. It is fairer, and it is what lasts in a family or long-distance relationship.
- Offer two or three slots rather than a single one.
- Avoid mealtimes, prayer times and local public holidays: check the other person’s country calendar.
- Say when your clocks change: “From Sunday I’ll be one hour further from you.”
Put the call in your calendar in the right time zone
Create the event with the time zone you wrote it down in. A good calendar then shows the time where you are and can show the second time as well. If you travel, or the clocks change in between, the event stays at the right moment instead of drifting by an hour.
Add a reminder early enough to get ready: with very different time zones, the call often lands at an unusual hour.
With oKiKo
In oKiKo’s Agenda, an event carries the time zone it was entered in. When a contact has a known location (their oKiKo profile, a shared location, or a hint in the conversation), the event shows both times, for example “14:00 for you · 20:00 in Bangkok”. A contact’s location is only a hint: if it is wrong, correct it in the chat’s info.
“Suggest times” looks at when you are free and writes a message in the chat such as “I’m free Tuesday from 2 to 4 pm…” in your language; sending translates it into the other person’s, with the usual preview before it goes. You stay in control: nothing is sent without you.
The site’s free tools (time converter, “when to call”) run in your browser and send nothing.