Time zone settings in Google Calendar and Outlook: a practical guide
Most "wrong time" meetings are not caused by bad math. They are caused by calendar settings: a laptop still set to the time zone of the last trip, or an event created with a fixed offset. A few minutes of setup prevent most of these errors.
Google Calendar
Check your main time zone
Open Google Calendar on a computer, click the gear icon and choose Settings. Under General › Time zone, confirm your primary time zone. You can also choose whether Google should ask to update it when you travel. If you travel often and want events to stay anchored to your home office, keep the primary zone fixed and change it only on purpose.
Show a second time zone
In the same section, enable Display secondary time zone and pick the city you work with most. The calendar grid will show two time columns, which makes it easy to see at a glance whether 3:00 PM for you is reasonable for your colleague.
Create an event in another time zone
When creating an event, open the full event details and click Time zone next to the date. You can set the start and end in a different city's time. This is useful when the meeting is anchored to a client's office hours rather than yours.
Outlook
Outlook for Windows (classic)
Go to File › Options › Calendar and find the Time zones section. Set your main time zone and enable Show a second time zone to add a second column with a label of your choice. When creating a meeting, the Time zones button on the meeting ribbon lets you set a different zone for the start and end.
New Outlook and Outlook on the web
Open Settings › Calendar › View. In the time zones area you can set your current zone and add additional time zones that appear in the calendar view. When creating an event, you can choose the time zone next to the start time.
Apple Calendar
On Mac, open Calendar › Settings › Advanced and turn on Turn on time zone support. A time zone menu appears in the toolbar and in each event, so you can create events in another city's time. On iPhone, the option is in Settings › Calendar › Time Zone Override; leave it off unless you want events always shown in one fixed zone.
Five habits that prevent errors
- Check your device's time zone after every trip. A phone that updated automatically and a laptop that did not will show different times.
- Create recurring meetings in a city time zone, never in "UTC−5" or a similar fixed offset, so daylight saving changes are handled correctly.
- Accept invitations from the email, not by recreating the event, so the original time zone is preserved.
- Look at the invite in your guest's time before sending: a second time zone column makes this immediate.
- Write each city's time in the invite text as a safety net for anyone reading on a phone.
How World Meeting Sync fits in
The planner does the comparison step: you choose the date and cities and see every participant's time. When you save the meeting, each guest gets buttons to add it to Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar. Those links carry the exact moment of the meeting, so each calendar shows it in the guest's own time zone.