Time zone meeting planner: find the hours your team overlaps

Published

Add each person on your team, their city or time zone, and the hours they actually work. The planner shows every hour of the chosen date side by side, highlights the hours where everyone is working, and gives you the meeting time in each person's own zone to paste into an invite. Nothing you enter is saved or sent anywhere.

How to use it

  1. Add the people in the meeting. Type a city ("Manila"), a country with a single time zone ("India"), or a time zone name ("Asia/Kolkata"). The first row is the time zone the grid is shown in, and it starts as yours.
  2. Set each person's working hours. The default is 9:00 to 17:00. Change it for anyone who starts early, works late, or works a night shift; a shift that runs past midnight works too.
  3. Pick the date. Overlaps change when clocks go forward or back, so the planner works them out for the exact day.
  4. Click an hour to see that moment in every person's time zone, then copy it.

How the overlap is worked out

An hour counts as shared only if it sits entirely inside every person's working hours. That matters for time zones on the half hour. India is five and a half hours ahead of London in winter, so 11:00 to 12:00 in London is 16:30 to 17:30 in India: the first half is inside a 9 to 5 day, the second half is not, and the planner does not count it.

The grid uses the time zone rules built into your browser, so daylight saving is applied for the date you choose. Cells are shaded three ways: working hours, awake but outside working hours (7:00 to 22:00), and night.

What typical overlaps look like

For people working 9:00 to 17:00 in their own time zones:

  • London and India share three whole hours in British summer time (9:00 to 12:00 London time) and two in winter.
  • New York and India share none. When New York starts at 9:00, it is already 18:30 or 19:30 in India.
  • New York and London share three hours, from 9:00 to 12:00 New York time, for most of the year.

The last one comes with a catch. The United States and Europe change their clocks on different dates, in March and again in October and November, so for a few weeks each spring and autumn the gap between them is an hour smaller than usual. Recurring meetings that looked fine can quietly move by an hour for some attendees. Check those weeks in the planner rather than trusting last month's invite.

When there is no overlap

If the planner finds no shared hour, you have three honest options.

  • Rotate the inconvenient slot. Pick the least-bad hour, which the planner suggests, and move it each week so the same person is not always the one joining at night.
  • Shrink the meeting. Often only two or three people need to be live. Meet with them and share the notes with everyone else.
  • Go async. For routine updates, a written check-in beats a meeting nobody can attend at a sensible hour. Managing a remote team across time zones covers how to make that the default, and the standup template includes a written version for distributed teams.

Timing a daily written update

Below the overlap, the planner also shows when everyone's workday is over, in your time zone. That is the earliest point at which a daily written summary can cover the whole team's day. Sent any earlier, it misses whatever the last time zone did that afternoon.

This is how Eodly schedules its evening report. Each person is asked for a short update at the start of their own day, in Slack, Telegram or Discord (Microsoft Teams coming soon), and Eodly weighs each update against what actually moved in GitHub and Linear. You get one page at a time you choose, 7 PM your time by default, showing who shipped, who is silent, and who is slipping. For a team across many time zones, set that time after the latest person's day ends; the planner tells you when that is.