Stop Doing Math Before Meetings: The Ultimate Guide to Managing Global Time Zones
Mental gymnastics to figure out what time it is in Tokyo? You're doing it wrong. Here's why your team needs a visual time zone board, not a calculator. -
There is no standard 8-to-6 overlap. Someone joins early or late.
A 13-hour difference puts Sydney and Buenos Aires out of sync — when one team is mid-morning, the other is fast asleep. Consider rotating the inconvenience: one week Sydney takes the early call, the next week Buenos Aires does. Finally, Sydney observes daylight saving and Buenos Aires doesn't, so this window shifts by an hour for part of the year — recheck it each spring and autumn.
| Local time | 12am | 1am | 2am | 3am | 4am | 5am | 6am | 7am | 8am | 9am | 10am | 11am | 12pm | 1pm | 2pm | 3pm | 4pm | 5pm | 6pm | 7pm | 8pm | 9pm | 10pm | 11pm |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Sydney Australia/Sydney | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Buenos Aires America/Argentina/Buenos Aires |
Mental gymnastics to figure out what time it is in Tokyo? You're doing it wrong. Here's why your team needs a visual time zone board, not a calculator. -
One in San Francisco, one in London, one in Sydney. Many of the best startups are built this way, and many fail because of it. A practical playbook for co-founder relationships across time zones in the first three years. -
8 AM Tokyo is 4 PM in Los Angeles the day before. West Coast afternoon windows, the East Coast dead zone, and why the Philippines slot is an hour off. -