Daylight Saving Weekends and Recurring Meetings

I run a weekly call with a small team split between Chicago and Berlin, and twice a year the meeting quietly breaks. Not the agenda — the time. The US and Europe change their clocks on different weekends, so for a couple of weeks the gap between us is an hour wider or narrower than usual, and someone shows up early or late.

The pattern is easy to forget. The US springs forward in March and falls back in November. Europe waits until the end of March to spring forward and the end of October to fall back. So in March, the US moves first. In late October, Europe moves first. Each time, there’s a stretch where the usual 4 p.m. my time is no longer 11 p.m. theirs.

What I do now is simple: the week before either change, I check the calendar instead of trusting memory.

• I look up both change dates and note which comes first.
• I open the recurring event and check its time zone setting, not just the displayed hour.
• I message the group with the actual local times for the next two weeks.
• I ask anyone traveling to confirm their own offset before the call.

That last one matters more than I expected. A colleague on a work trip can be two time zones off from their usual base, and the calendar invite won’t always reflect it. We’ve had a call where three people were correct and two were an hour early, all because the organizer’s laptop was still on the old offset.

When I’m unsure which offset applies on a given date, I open this time zone tool and compare both cities side by side before I edit the invite. It takes a minute and saves the awkward “are we starting now?” messages.

I also try to keep the recurring meeting at a time that survives the shift. If a slot only works during the two weeks when the offsets happen to line up, it isn’t really a recurring meeting — it’s a coincidence. Checking the week before has become part of my routine, like charging my laptop.

— Chris Walker