Setting working hours that actually survive a distributed team

Timezone conversion is a solved problem; a tool does it in milliseconds. What isn't solved is that most teams have never stated when each person is genuinely available, so every scheduling attempt becomes a negotiation conducted one message at a time across a twelve-hour lag.

State real hours, not aspirational ones

The default assumption is 9-to-5, and for a lot of people it's wrong. Someone with a school run is unavailable in the middle of the morning. Someone who deliberately starts early to overlap with a distant colleague is done by mid-afternoon. If the stated hours don't match the real ones, every suggested slot inherits the error and people decline invitations for reasons the tool never saw.

Write down the hours you will actually take a meeting in — not the hours you are nominally employed for. These are different numbers and the second one is useless for scheduling.

Separate 'working' from 'available for meetings'

A nine-hour working day rarely means nine hours of meeting availability. Protecting a focus block and declaring a narrower meeting window is more honest than declaring a wide window and then declining half of what lands in it. Narrow, accurate windows produce fewer suggestions but a much higher acceptance rate.

Publish an explicit overlap expectation

For a team spread across many zones, the useful contract is not 'be online at these hours' but 'guarantee this much overlap with these people'. That gives individuals control over their own day while keeping the collaboration property the team actually needs. It also makes the tradeoff visible when someone relocates: the question becomes whether the required overlap still exists, which is answerable, rather than whether the move is 'workable', which isn't.

Re-check after every change

• Someone relocates, even by one zone.
• A daylight-saving transition on either side.
• A new person joins from a zone nobody else is in.
• Someone changes their hours for childcare, study, or health.

Each of these invalidates whatever slot the team settled on, usually without anyone announcing it. Running the participants through the planner again takes under a minute and replaces a slow drift into a meeting that half the team resents.