Time zone meeting planner

How the time zone meeting planner works

Add the places your team works from and the hours each person actually works. The planner lays the day out as a grid: one row per place, one column per hour of the first place’s day. Every column is a single moment, so reading down a column tells you what that moment is for everyone.

• Orange hours sit fully inside that person’s working hours.
• Pale orange hours are early or late: partly outside working hours, or within two hours either side. Most people will take a call then now and again, but not every week.
• Grey hours are night, or a Saturday or Sunday if you count weekends as off. A meeting on Friday afternoon in San Francisco is already Saturday morning in Bengaluru.
• A check mark over a column means the hour works for everyone. If no column gets one, the planner marks the closest hours instead: nobody at night, as few people as possible early or late.

Times are converted for the date you pick, with your browser’s own time zone database, so daylight saving is right for that day rather than for today. Places with half-hour offsets, such as India, show their real local times, like 9:30.

How to pick a fair time across time zones

1. Start from real working hours. 9 to 5 is the default, but ask. Someone who starts at 7 to collect the kids at 3 changes the overlap more than any time zone does.
2. Protect the overlap. If the shared window is two hours, it is the most valuable time your team has. Spend it on conversations that need everyone live, and keep status updates out of it.
3. Look at who pays. A pale cell is a person dialling in before breakfast or after dinner. Check whose row it is, and whether it is the same person every time.
4. Check the day, not just the hour. Monday morning in Sydney is still Sunday in California. The weekday shows in the grid at each place’s midnight, and the table under it gives every local date.
5. Keep it short. A call that runs into someone’s evening costs more than the time on the invite. The meeting cost calculator puts a figure on a recurring one.

Rotate the inconvenient slot

Some pairs of places never overlap. San Francisco and Bengaluru are 13.5 hours apart in November and 12.5 hours apart in July, so with 9 to 5 days on both sides there is no shared hour. Somebody has to stretch.

The fair way is to take turns. One week, meet at 8:00 AM in San Francisco, which is 9:30 PM in Bengaluru. The next, meet at 7:00 PM in San Francisco, which is 8:30 AM the following morning in Bengaluru. Each side gets one awkward slot every other week, instead of one side getting all of them. Put both slots in the calendar as separate recurring meetings, so nobody has to remember whose turn it is.

The weeks when the US and Europe are out of step

The US and the EU both move their clocks forward in spring and back in autumn, but not on the same days.

• US: daylight saving time starts at 2:00 AM local time on the second Sunday in March and ends at 2:00 AM on the first Sunday in November, under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (NIST, daylight saving time).
• EU: summer time starts on the last Sunday in March and ends on the last Sunday in October, at 1:00 AM GMT in every member state at once (Directive 2000/84/EC, Articles 2 and 3; see also the European Commission).

So for a few weeks a year the gap between the two is one hour smaller than usual. New York and Berlin are normally 6 hours apart; in these weeks they are 5.

The US dates for 2026 are the ones NIST lists; the others follow from the two rules above. In practice, a 10:00 AM standup set in New York time lands at 4:00 PM in Berlin most of the year and at 3:00 PM in these weeks. The shared window for a 9 to 5 day grows from two hours to three. Pick a date inside one of these weeks and the planner shows it.

When there is no overlap, go async

If the grid has no check marks and the closest hours land on the same people every time, stop looking for a better slot. Move the work out of the meeting instead:

• Write the update down. A short written status, posted at the end of each person’s day, is ready when the other side wakes up.
• Decide in a document. Put the proposal, the options and a deadline in one place, and give the deadline in every reader’s local time.
• Record the walkthrough. A few minutes of screen recording replaces a demo nobody can attend live.
• Keep one live call. Rotate it, keep it short, and use it for what writing does badly: hard conversations, planning and getting to know each other.

Our guide to async communication goes into how a team makes that switch.

Written and maintained by the DoneThat team. The worked times on this page were checked against the planner code, and the daylight saving rules were last checked against their sources on 3 November 2026.

Frequently asked questions