Best overlap: 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM in Tokyo is 8:00 AM to 11:00 AM in Milan.
Aim for 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM Tokyo time — that's 8:00 AM to 11:00 AM over in Milan. Around 3 hours of overlap is enough to work comfortably, as long as meetings don't drift to the end of one team's day. Finally, Milan observes daylight saving and Tokyo 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tokyo Asia/Tokyo | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Milan Europe/Rome |
An 8 AM Pacific launch is 5 PM in London and 1 AM in Sydney. Your blog post, your engineering on-call, your support team, and your Twitter schedule are all picking different hours. Here is how to plan a launch that does not embarrass you in any time zone. -
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. -
Most distributed teams either keep the daily standup and exclude someone, or kill it and lose the rhythm. There is a better third option. Here is how to redesign the daily standup so it works across nine time zones. -