How to book a meeting in another time zone, and make it repeat
Create the event in the time zone of the place it is set by, choosing a city rather than an abbreviation, and your calendar shows it at your own time; add that city as a second time zone to see both side by side. A repeating meeting is one series: change one date for a one-off, or the series for good.
30 October 2026 · 4 min read
How calendars store a time
An event is saved with its time and its time zone, and every calendar that shows it works out the local time for whoever is looking. So the event should carry the zone of the place that decides it: a supplier’s call at 10:00 in Colombo should be made as 10:00 Asia/Colombo, and it will show at 04:30 or 05:30 in London depending on the time of year.
Choose zones by city. IST means India, Ireland or Israel depending on who you ask, and BST means British Summer Time to one person and Bangladesh to another. Calendar programs list zones by city for this reason.
Setting the zone and showing a second one
- Outlook: in a new event, Time Zones in the ribbon adds a zone to the start and end. File, Options, Calendar, Time zones shows a second zone down the side of the calendar.
- Google Calendar: in a new event, the Time zone link beside the time. Settings, Time zone, Display secondary time zone adds a second column.
- Apple Calendar: turn on Time Zone Support in Settings, Advanced, then each event gets a zone, and the calendar has a zone menu at the top.
Repeating events
A repeating event is one series with a rule: every weekday, the first Monday of the month. When you change one occurrence, the program asks whether you mean this event, this and the ones after, or all of them. Changing one date makes an exception and leaves the rule alone. Changing the series rewrites every date that has not been changed on its own.
The weeks when clocks disagree
Countries change their clocks on different dates, and many never do. The UK and EU move on the last Sundays of March and October, the US on the second Sunday of March and the first of November, and Sri Lanka, India and much of Asia not at all. For a few weeks a year the gap between two places is an hour different. A repeating meeting set in one zone stays at the same time there, and moves by an hour for everybody else. Agree whose clock the meeting follows, and set it in that zone.
Our own product, disclosed
Where our own software comes into this
We make Rutba Office, a free desktop suite for Windows. Its Calendar makes an event repeat every weekday, moves one day of the run on its own or changes the whole run, and books an event at another place’s time, which it shows at the time it comes to where you are. Second time zone puts another city’s hours beside your own. Calendars stay on your computer, or sync with your own CalDAV server.
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