Most teams spread across continents treat time zones as a scheduling problem: find the hour that hurts everyone equally, book the meeting, apologize to whoever drew the late slot. I have done it, for years, across Atlanta, Krakow, and Bangalore. I think it is the wrong frame, and that the right one is planning.
The scheduling frame loses by design
When time zones are a scheduling problem, the only lever is the calendar, and the calendar cannot win. Atlanta and Bangalore overlap for about two hours on a good day. Every synchronous thing has to fit into that window or push someone into their evening. The window fills up with status meetings, the real work waits for it, and the people in the inconvenient zone learn that the organization's clock is set somewhere else.
The deeper cost is the waiting. A question asked at the end of one day gets its answer at the start of the next, which means a one-line clarification costs twenty hours. Multiply that by every ambiguous ticket and the team is slower than any single office would be, for reasons nobody can see on a dashboard.
The planning frame
I think the question to ask instead is: what work can we give each location so that nobody is blocked by someone who is asleep. That is a planning question. It gets answered when the work is divided, not when the meeting is booked.
In practice it means a few things. Work is split along boundaries that match locations, so a team in one zone owns a whole thing rather than half of two things. Interfaces between those things are agreed early and written down, because the written agreement is what lets two zones work on either side of it without talking. And the decisions that will come up are anticipated, with the answers already recorded, so that the engineer in Bangalore at 10am does not need the architect in Atlanta at midnight.
What has to be written
The planning frame only works if more gets written down than feels natural to people who sit together. The reason for a decision, not just the decision. The current state of a problem, updated at the end of each day so the next zone can pick it up. The question someone wanted to ask in a hallway, posted instead where the answer will be waiting when they wake up.
I think of this as the team's handoff discipline, and I think it is the single practice that separates distributed teams that work from ones that merely exist.
What the overlap is for
Once the plan carries most of the load, the few overlapping hours become valuable instead of contested. I think they should be spent on the things that genuinely need people in the same conversation: the decisions that are hard to make in writing, the disagreements, the relationships. Status does not need the overlap. Status can be read.
What this asks of a manager
The scheduling frame asks the manager to be fair about meeting times. The planning frame asks for more: to shape work so that each location can finish something on its own, to insist on the writing, and to resist the pull toward a center where the decisions happen and the other zones find out later.
That last part is the hard one. Every distributed organization drifts toward a headquarters clock unless someone pushes back. I think pushing back is most of the job.
Photo source: https://photos.robertstowe.com/new-zealand