Meeting Planner

Find the best time for meetings across multiple time zones.

Working Hours Overview

How to Use the Meeting Planner

Step 1: Select Your Time Zones

Choose a city from each dropdown menu to represent the locations of your meeting participants. The tool comes pre-loaded with New York and London. Add as many zones as you need using the "+ Add Time Zone" button, up to a maximum of six. Remove any zone with the red × button. Each row shows the zone name, the local clock time at the selected hour, and the 24-hour local time in parentheses.

Step 2: Drag the UTC Slider

The UTC slider ranges from 0 to 23 and is the primary control for exploring time overlap. As you drag it, every zone updates instantly to show the equivalent local time. The slider value displayed above reads as UTC, giving you an unambiguous reference point for the slot you are evaluating. Slide it back and forth to see when each participant starts their day, when they break for lunch, and when they finish.

Step 3: Check the Working Hours Grid

Below the slider is a grid showing each zone at four snapshot hours: 6 a.m., 10 a.m., 2 p.m., and 6 p.m. UTC. Green cells indicate local times between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., which is the standard working day. Red cells mark local times before 7 a.m. or after 9 p.m., considered off-hours. Your goal is to find a UTC hour where the maximum number of cells turn green across all zones. A full row of green means that hour works for everyone.

Step 4: Agree and Schedule

Once you identify a slot with strong overlap, note the UTC time and communicate it to all participants. Because UTC does not observe daylight saving time, storing the meeting time in UTC eliminates confusion when clocks shift at different points in the year in different countries. Include each participant's local time in your meeting invitation so nobody has to calculate it themselves.

Why Use a Meeting Planner?

Remote teams and international clients are now standard, not exceptional. A meeting planner solves a problem that ad-hoc scheduling cannot: visualizing multiple time zones simultaneously. Without a dedicated tool, planners rely on mental math or static conversion tables, both of which are error-prone and slow. This planner converts every zone into a single UTC reference and surfaces overlapping working hours in real time.

Eliminates Guesswork

When scheduling across three or more zones, the odds of picking a time that falls outside business hours for at least one participant are very high. The grid view makes overlap explicit, so you can make data-driven decisions instead of guessing. You see immediately which hours are universally green and which require a compromise.

Fairness Across Regions

A common problem in distributed teams is that one region consistently gets the worst slot. By visualizing all zones side by side, the planner makes it easy to rotate inconvenient hours fairly. No single team should bear a 7 a.m. or 10 p.m. start time week after week. Use the tool to demonstrate to stakeholders why the inconvenient slot exists and how often each region is asked to accommodate.

Saves Time

Instead of sending three or four emails back and forth to find a time that works, you can resolve the question in seconds. The real-time slider lets you scan every hour of the day across every zone without leaving the page. What used to take a day of calendar ping-pong now takes under a minute.

Best Practices for Scheduling Across Time Zones

Look for Overlapping Working Hours

The ideal meeting window lands between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. for every participant. When your team spans North America, Europe, and Asia, the most common overlap zones are late morning in the Americas and early evening in Europe. Use the grid to identify these pockets of shared daytime. The best slot is often around 14:00 to 16:00 UTC, which corresponds to mid-to-late afternoon in Europe and mid-morning on the US East Coast.

Respect Lunch and Local Breaks

A meeting at 12 p.m. UTC may seem reasonable, but for many cultures lunch breaks are non-negotiable and can last up to two hours. When possible, avoid scheduling over noon local time for any participant. The grid columns at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. UTC give you a quick check on whether your chosen hour sits squarely in the middle of the local workday or clips a break period. If in doubt, ask local team members what their typical lunch window looks like.

Be Time-Zone Aware in Communication

Always state meeting times in UTC and include a parenthetical local time for each region. For example: "Meeting at 15:00 UTC (11 a.m. New York, 5 p.m. Paris, 11 p.m. Singapore)." This eliminates ambiguity about who is expected when and reduces the chance of missed meetings due to misread times. Avoid using abbreviations like EST or PST without specifying whether daylight saving is in effect. UTC is unambiguous.

Rotate Unpleasant Hours

If a full overlap is impossible, rotate the inconvenient slot among participants. Track the rotation in a shared document so everyone can see that the burden is balanced. Teams that rotate fairly report higher satisfaction and lower burnout from off-hours meetings. A simple alternating schedule where each region takes the early or late slot on a rotating basis keeps morale high.

Common Meeting Time Challenges

Daylight Saving Time Changes

Daylight saving time affects dozens of countries, but not all observe it, and those that do switch on different dates. The United States moves to DST in March, most of Europe shifts in late March, and the Southern Hemisphere observes daylight saving during its summer months. This means the offset between New York and Berlin can be 6 hours for part of the year and 5 hours for the rest. A meeting that worked in January may be broken in March. Using UTC as your anchor avoids this problem entirely because UTC never changes. After DST transitions, always re-check your recurring meetings in the planner to confirm the overlap still works.

Half-Hour and Quarter-Hour Time Zones

Not every time zone aligns to a full hour. India operates on UTC+5:30, Nepal uses UTC+5:45, and parts of Australia observe UTC+9:30. When your participants include locations with fractional offsets, the working day boundaries shift accordingly. A 9 a.m. local start in India corresponds to 3:30 UTC, which is a non-standard hour in the grid. The planner accounts for this natively because it relies on the IANA time zone database, which includes every fractional offset. Always check the local hour displayed in the tool rather than assuming a clean hourly offset.

Cultural Working Hours

Working hours differ significantly across cultures. In many European countries, a standard workday starts at 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. and ends by 5 p.m. or 6 p.m., with a one-hour lunch break. In parts of the Middle East, the workweek runs Sunday through Thursday and the workday may start later. In Japan, it is common for employees to be at their desks before 9 a.m. and to stay past 7 p.m. The tool uses a 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. window as a universal baseline, but you should adjust expectations based on the specific norms of each participant. The grid is a guide, not a hard rule.

Weekday Misalignment

When one participant is already in Tuesday while another is still in Monday, scheduling becomes confusing. The planner displays local times for the current day. If your team includes members in Australia and the Americas, be mindful that the date at the top of their calendar may differ from yours. Always confirm the date as well as the time when confirming a meeting. A simple "Tuesday June 9 at 15:00 UTC" avoids the Monday-versus-Tuesday confusion that cross-date-line teams often encounter.