How to find the best time to call someone across time zones
The call I keep meaning to make is the one home, and for about two years it kept slipping. I would remember at the wrong moment, decide it was a bad hour, tell myself I would do it tomorrow, and tomorrow the same thing happened. When I did get it right I often opened with "sorry, did I wake you", which is not the warmest way to start a chat with people you miss. Working out the best time to call across time zones turns out to be its own small skill, and it is not the same as booking a meeting. A meeting has a calendar doing the sums for you. A call home is just you, half-guessing, usually late at night when you finally remember.
I have been working remotely across Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand and Indonesia for a while now, with family back in Australia and a couple of close friends who have drifted further out, one to London and one to the west coast of the States. So this is not theory. I have made every version of the badly timed call, including a few of the genuinely 5am ones.
Why calling someone is harder than booking a meeting
A work meeting comes with a shared assumption. Everyone is at a desk, in work mode, and a slightly awkward hour is tolerable because it is work. A personal call is different. The window where a real conversation with your mum or an old friend feels good is narrow. Nobody wants to go deep at 7am with a coffee they have not drunk yet, or at 11pm when they are already half asleep. So the real question is a fussier one. When can you call someone in a different time zone and catch both of you actually up for it.
Find the overlap window, not just the time
The useful unit is the overlap, the band of hours where you are both awake and not rushing off somewhere, rather than their time or yours on its own. Map their good hours against yours and look for where the two cross. Say their civilised calling hours run from about 8am to 9pm, and yours are much the same. With a two or three hour gap between you, that overlap is generous and you barely have to think about it. At eight or nine hours apart it can shrink to almost nothing, and one of you has to give something up.
A real example. Me in Bangkok, a friend in London, about six or seven hours between us depending on the season. My evening was his early afternoon, fine for him but too early for the proper wind-down chat I wanted. His evening was the middle of my night. The only humane overlap was my late morning against his breakfast, so our calls quietly became a Saturday thing, coffee for me and barely awake for him. Once we admitted that was the only slot that actually worked, we stopped missing each other. Staying in touch across time zones got easier the moment we stopped pretending every hour was available.
A fixed imperfect time beats a perfect time you keep failing to arrange.
The traps that cause the 5am call
Almost every badly timed call I have made came from one of these, and none of them is simply not knowing the offset.
- Daylight saving runs opposite ways north and south. When I call Australia from Europe, the gap swings by a couple of hours across the year, so an arrangement that felt right in July is an hour off by January.
- Not every offset is a whole hour. India is five and a half hours from UTC, Nepal is five and three quarters, and parts of Australia sit on the half hour too. Round it in your head and you have messaged someone thirty minutes into their sleep.
- The date moves, not just the clock. My Sunday evening can be their Monday morning. Agreeing to call on "Sunday" with no date attached is how two people end up certain and a day apart.
- Your phone follows you. Land in a new country and everything resets to local time, including the reminder you set to call home. The device is being helpful in exactly the wrong way.
Make it a standing time, not a weekly negotiation
The single thing that fixed this for me was to stop deciding it fresh every week. My family call is Sunday, my morning and their evening, and because it never moves nobody does the maths and nobody forgets. It is not the perfect hour for either of us. It is a fixed one, and a fixed imperfect time beats a perfect time you keep failing to arrange. Calling family in another country gets much easier once the call has a home in the week.
For a one-off, send availability the way you would for work. Offer two or three windows in their local time and let them choose. Writing the time in their zone rather than yours is a small courtesy that takes the arithmetic off the person you are trying to reach, and it quietly removes the polite back-and-forth where neither of you wants to say a time is bad.
Keep their time where you can see it
Most of my bad-hour calls came from not knowing, at a glance, what time it was for the other person. If I had to open a converter I usually could not be bothered, so I guessed, and guessing is how you end up apologising. Now I keep the places that matter visible: home, wherever I currently am and the two or three people far enough away that I get them wrong. One look tells me whether it is a kind hour to message, and knowing what time is it for them before I hit call has saved a lot of apologies.
This is the itch that made me build Meridian Clock. It keeps a city's local time and weather on one screen, so you can see at a glance whether people there are likely to be up, and you can anchor an alarm to a city so a call home stays at the right local hour even after you have flown somewhere else. It is the old idea of a row of clocks on the office wall, rebuilt for a life where the walls keep moving.
The short version
The best time to call across time zones is rarely a perfect hour, so stop waiting for one. Work out the overlap where you are both properly awake, turn the calls that matter into standing times so nobody has to negotiate them, keep the other person's clock somewhere you can see, then check the date and not just the hour. None of it is clever. It just swaps a guess you keep getting wrong for a glance you can trust.
The calls I regret are the ones I kept saving for a better time. A slightly awkward hour you actually ring at is worth more than the perfect one you never quite get to.
Meridian Clock
An alarm and world clock for living across timezones. Anchor an alarm to a city and it stays on that city's time when you travel, with the weather and your next meeting right there when it rings.
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