How to Schedule a Meeting Across US Time Zones

Identify the earliest and latest zones your participants are in, and look for the overlap in standard business hours — for a group spanning only Eastern to Pacific, that's typically 12 PM–4 PM Eastern (9 AM–1 PM Pacific).

For recurring meetings across a wide zone spread — especially one including Hawaii or Alaska — rotating the meeting time so no single zone always gets the earliest or latest slot tends to be viewed as fairer over time than fixing one group's convenience permanently.

Always name the reference zone explicitly in invitations ("2 PM Eastern" rather than just "2 PM") and let calendar software handle each participant's local conversion — manual conversion is where most cross-zone scheduling mistakes happen.

Double-check scheduling in the two or three weeks around US daylight saving transitions, since a meeting set before the change may display incorrectly for participants whose calendar software didn't update the recurrence properly.

When more than two zones are involved, anchoring all communication to a single reference zone — describing every time in Eastern Time, for instance, regardless of who's speaking — reduces the chance of error compared to everyone converting independently from their own local zone.

For teams that also include Hawaii, Alaska, or a US territory, it helps to acknowledge upfront that no single meeting time will be equally convenient for everyone, and to be explicit about which zone is being deprioritized for a given call so the inconvenience doesn't always fall on the same people.

It's also worth confirming the meeting time again in the two weeks surrounding a daylight saving transition, since a recurring invite created months earlier can occasionally display incorrectly if a participant's calendar software or time zone setting wasn't updated for the new offset.