Internal Comms & Meetings

How to schedule meetings across timezones as Chief of Staff and Founder's Office

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're coordinating a 9-person exec team spread across San Francisco, New York, London, and Singapore. Every cross-timezone meeting starts with a 15-message Slack thread where someone pastes a time zone converter screenshot and someone else replies 'does 8am PT work?' You're manually checking five Google Calendars, triangulating availability in your head, sending a calendar invite, getting a conflict back, and starting over. For the quarterly offsite alone you spent two hours just landing on a time that didn't cut into someone's school pickup or Singapore's lunch. You have better things to do than be a human Doodle poll.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A public booking page synced live to your calendar (and the exec team's) so external guests book into real gaps without a single back-and-forth email

Automated post-meeting notes with decisions, action items, and owner assignments surfaced in Slack so nothing disappears into someone's memory

A scheduling dashboard that shows you the week's cross-timezone meetings, flags conflicts, and lets you reschedule with one natural-language prompt

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Scheduling Meeting Notes Email Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Google Calendar data on a schedule (events, availability, 12 months back and 3 months forward) and syncs your Slack workspace to deliver summaries and confirmations. Gmail is also synced on a schedule for the email-agent morning briefing. Calendly bookings flow in via Starch's direct Calendly connection. No browser automation needed for this stack — all core providers connect directly.

Prompts to copy

Build me a booking page for 30-minute and 60-minute calls. Pull my available hours from Google Calendar. Block off 9am–10am PT daily as no-meeting focus time, add 15-minute buffers between back-to-back slots, and show times in the guest's local timezone automatically.

After every meeting that has more than two attendees, transcribe the call, write a three-sentence summary, extract action items with owner names, and post the summary to the #exec-ops Slack channel. Archive the full transcript so I can search it later.

Every morning at 7am PT, check my calendar for the day, flag any meetings where attendees span more than two time zones, and draft a Slack message to each attendee confirming the time in their local zone. Send it to me for review before it goes out.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Google Calendar: Starch syncs your calendar on a schedule — all events, all attendees, recurring blocks — so every app and automation you build pulls from the same live dataset.

2 Connect Calendly: Starch connects directly to Calendly so booking events trigger downstream automations (notes, Slack pings, follow-up drafts) the moment a meeting is confirmed.

3 Connect Slack: Starch syncs your Slack workspace so the meeting-notes app can post summaries to the right channel (#exec-ops, #board-prep, or wherever your team actually reads things) without you copy-pasting.

4 Connect Gmail: Starch syncs Gmail on a schedule so the email-agent can read scheduling threads, draft timezone-aware confirmation emails, and flag unresolved meeting requests that have gone quiet.

5 Start the Scheduling app from the App Store: it gives you a booking page out of the box. Customize it by telling Starch: 'Add a meeting type called CEO Sync — 45 minutes, Tuesdays and Thursdays only, 8am–12pm PT, require a one-line agenda from the guest before they can confirm.'

6 Turn on the Meeting Notes app from the App Store: tell Starch which Slack channel should receive summaries and whether you want action items formatted as a checklist or a table. The app handles transcription, summarization, and posting.

7 Build the timezone-conflict checker automation: tell Starch 'Every Sunday at 6pm, look at next week's calendar. For any meeting with attendees in more than two timezones, check whether the scheduled time falls outside 8am–6pm for any participant and flag it to me in Slack with a suggested alternative time.'

8 Build the pre-meeting brief automation: tell Starch 'One hour before each external meeting, pull the guest's name from the calendar invite, search Gmail for any prior thread with them, and post a two-sentence context summary to my Slack DM so I know what we last talked about.'

9 Set up an exec-availability dashboard: tell Starch 'Build me a view that shows this week's calendar for the six people on my exec team, grouped by day, and highlights any window where four or more of us are free simultaneously.' Use this for impromptu alignment calls.

10 Wire the rescheduling workflow: tell Starch 'When a meeting gets cancelled less than 24 hours before it starts, draft a reschedule email to all attendees proposing three alternative times that work across the attendees' timezones, and put it in my Gmail drafts.'

11 Test the full loop with a real external meeting: book through the Calendly link, confirm the calendar event appears, let Meeting Notes run after the call, and check that the Slack summary lands in the right channel with action items attributed to the right people.

12 Share the booking link in your email signature and the CEO's — from this point on, 'when are you free?' threads route to the link instead of to you.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Q2 2026 Exec Offsite Planning — April coordination sprint

Sample numbers from a real run

Attendees to coordinate	9
Timezones spanned (PT, ET, GMT, SGT)	4
Scheduling back-and-forth messages eliminated	34
Minutes saved on post-meeting note distribution per meeting	25
Unresolved action items caught by meeting-notes app in first two weeks	11

In early April, you needed to land a 2-hour offsite planning call with nine execs across PT, ET, GMT, and SGT — a range that makes almost every time slot bad for someone. Previously this took two to three days of Slack threads. Instead, you told Starch: 'Find a 2-hour window in the next 10 business days where all nine of these Google Calendar accounts are free, avoiding before 8am or after 6pm in each person's local time. Propose the top three options in a table with local times for each timezone.' Starch returned three options in 40 seconds. You picked one, sent the invite. The pre-meeting brief automation pulled prior email threads with each attendee and surfaced a three-line context note 60 minutes before the call. After the call, Meeting Notes posted a summary to #exec-ops: six decisions, nine action items, owners named. Two of those action items had been verbally agreed on in a prior meeting three weeks earlier and never written down — the searchable archive caught the gap when someone asked 'wait, didn't we already decide on venue budget?'

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Time-to-confirmed-meeting for cross-timezone scheduling (target: under 10 minutes from request to calendar invite)

Action item capture rate: percentage of verbal commitments in exec meetings that surface as written, assigned tasks

No-show and late-reschedule rate on external bookings (tracked via Calendly sync)

CEO and exec calendar utilization: ratio of deep-work blocks to meeting blocks each week

Scheduling-related email thread volume: messages in Gmail threads containing 'when are you free' or timezone questions per week

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Calendly alone

Handles inbound booking well but does nothing with the data after the meeting is booked — no notes, no action-item extraction, no conflict detection across the exec team's calendars.

Notion + manual notes doc

Good for archiving decisions if someone actually writes them up, but that person is usually you, and it doesn't surface action items automatically or connect back to calendar or email.

Clockwise or Motion

Smart calendar defrag tools, but they optimize individual schedules rather than letting you build custom cross-team coordination logic or automate what happens before and after a meeting.

EA or executive coordinator

A human EA handles judgment calls and relationship nuance better than any automation, but costs $80–120k/year fully loaded and still needs to manually copy information between Slack, Calendar, Gmail, and Notion the way you do now.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — scheduling, meeting notes, email agent all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does the booking page actually show my real-time calendar availability, or does it go stale?

Starch syncs your Google Calendar on a schedule, so the booking page reflects your actual calendar including same-day changes. If you block off a slot manually at 9am, it won't show as available for a 9am booking that afternoon. The sync frequency is tight enough for scheduling purposes — you're not flying blind.

Can the meeting-notes app pull from calls that happen on Zoom or Google Meet, or only calls booked through Starch?

Meeting Notes works with any call where a transcript or recording is available — it doesn't require the meeting to be booked through Starch's Scheduling app. If your team records Zoom calls, the transcription pipeline can process those. If you need browser-based access to a specific call platform, Starch can also automate it through your browser — no API required.

What if an exec is in a timezone that makes every shared window inconvenient — like Singapore vs. PT?

That's a judgment call no automation should make for you, but Starch can surface the tradeoffs clearly. You tell it 'find the best window for these nine people and show me a table with what time it is for each person.' You see that 8am PT is 11pm SGT and decide whether to rotate meeting times or carve out an async alternative. Starch gives you the data; you make the call.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? Calendar and email data is sensitive.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet. If your company requires SOC 2 for all tools that touch email or calendar data, that's worth flagging to your IT or legal team before you connect Gmail or Google Calendar.

We use Outlook and Teams, not Gmail and Google Calendar. Does this work for us?

Yes. Starch syncs Outlook messages, events, calendars, and contacts on a schedule the same way it syncs Gmail and Google Calendar. The Scheduling and Meeting Notes apps work with your Outlook calendar. Slack and Teams are both reachable — Slack via Starch's direct connection, and Microsoft Teams either through the integration catalog or browser automation depending on the specific workflow you're building.

Can I use this to manage the CEO's calendar, not just my own?

Yes, as long as you have calendar access (delegate or shared). Connect the CEO's Google Calendar the same way you connect your own — Starch syncs it on a schedule and treats it as another data source. The exec-availability dashboard, conflict checker, and pre-meeting brief automations all work across multiple calendars. That's the whole point for a chief of staff role.