Common working hours are found by converting each person's working range to UTC and taking the intersection. If the intersection falls below two hours, a meeting-driven calendar stops working and the team needs to move to a written flow.
How the calculation works
It's a three-step process.
1. Write each person's working range in their own local time.
2. Convert them all to UTC. Istanbul runs on UTC+3, Berlin on UTC+2 in summer, New York on UTC-4 in summer.
3. Stack the ranges and mark the shared band. That band is the only window in which the team can talk live.
Daylight saving time shifts this window twice a year. Because Europe and North America switch on different dates, there's a multi-week drift in between. The canonical record of time-zone rules is kept in the IANA Time Zone Database.
What to do when the shared window narrows
When the window drops below two hours, these rules keep the team on its feet:
- Use the meeting only for topics that produce a decision; write the updates down
- Rotate recurring meetings across hours so the early-wake burden doesn't always land on the same person
- Write the meeting notes and the decision into a permanent document, so anyone who missed it catches up from the text
- State the response-time expectation in hours, so not everyone treats every message as urgent
A narrow window doesn't mean the team is inefficient. In teams with a narrow overlap, work runs on written handoff instead of conversation. A note left at end of day is read at the start of the day in the other time zone, and work picks up where it left off.
What Lodos solves here
For the shared window to stay visible, the calendar, the chat, and the meeting notes have to live in the same place. Calendar puts the recurring meeting on a shared calendar, MeMeet captures the note and action item taken during the call, and channels carry the traffic that falls outside the window. The module list for distributed teams is on the Remote Teams page.
Here's the limit: the Lodos calendar doesn't auto-intersect per-person working hours to hand you a ready window — you compute the overlap once by hand and pin it to the calendar.
Writing the window into the calendar as a fixed block also helps. Once the block is visible, meeting requests naturally cluster inside it, and invites outside the shared hours drop off.
For how capacity turns into a plan, see the time tracking breakdown.
FAQ
How many common working hours should there be? Two hours is the floor for most teams. That window is enough for a decision meeting and an urgent clarification.
Does daylight saving break the plan? It does. Because Europe and North America switch on different dates, the shared window drifts by an hour for a few weeks twice a year.