The best hour to reach someone eight zones away
There is usually exactly one good slot, it is at the edge of somebody's day, and picking it deliberately beats rediscovering it every week.
The short answer
Take the late afternoon of the western city, which is the early morning of the eastern one — and fix it, rather than searching for a new time each week.
At an eight-hour gap, two standard working days barely intersect. The workable slot is the last hour or two of the earlier city's day meeting the first hour or two of the later one's.
Why there is only one slot
Two eight-hour working days separated by eight hours do not overlap at all. In practice people flex an hour or so at each end, which produces a window of one to two hours — and it can only be in one place: the western city's late afternoon, the eastern city's early morning.
That is not a preference. It is the only intersection that exists.
Which end should give way?
Someone is working outside their normal hours. Three ways to decide, in rough order of how well they hold:
Whoever has the most flexible day. Someone without school runs or a dense meeting calendar absorbs an early start more easily. This is a real difference and worth asking about rather than assuming.
Whoever is fewer. If one person is remote from a group of eight, an early start for one beats a late finish for eight — but that arithmetic should be said out loud, not assumed, because it always lands on the same person.
Rotate. If it is genuinely symmetrical, alternate monthly. Not weekly — nobody adapts to a weekly change, and it produces more irritation than the original problem.
Prefer evening over morning, if you can choose
When both options exist, an unsociable evening is usually easier on people than an unsociable morning.
Evenings cost you your own time and you know in advance what you are giving up. Early mornings cost you sleep, they compound over weeks, and they make the rest of the day worse. People who take a 6am call for six months tend to leave.
Fix it, then leave it alone
Whatever slot you land on, the important property is that it stops moving.
A fixed slot can be planned around: childcare, gym, the school run, the rest of the calendar. A slot that is renegotiated weekly consumes attention every week and is never protected by anyone.
Fix the time in local terms for both parties, write both down, and put them in the invitation body:
Weekly sync — 16:30 London / 08:30 Los Angeles
Then diary the two dates it can break
The slot will move on its own if the two cities are in regions with different daylight-saving rules. The moments to check are mid-March and late October to early November, when the US and Europe are briefly out of step, and any time one side does not observe DST at all.
If one of your cities is in India, Arizona, or most of Asia, the gap moves twice a year without that side doing anything. See IST to EST.
And consider not meeting
At eight zones apart, a recurring synchronous meeting is expensive. A written handover plus a fortnightly call is often strictly better than a weekly call that one person attends half-asleep.
The meeting was never the goal. The information transfer was.
Related: When are two cities both awake? · Working across time zones
Timezone: World Clock Widget
A world clock, converter and live day/night map for iPhone — 325 cities, offline, no account.
Figures on this page are computed from the IANA time zone database. Last generated 2026-08-18.