Multi-Timezone Meeting Planner

How to use this tool

1. Choose a date for the meeting.
2. Add 2 or more cities using the dropdown.
3. Adjust working hours for each city if needed (default 9–17).
4. Move the candidate time slider to find a window that works for everyone.
5. Download a duration-aware .ics file, or copy a share link that restores the meeting settings when opened.

How to plan a meeting across timezones

Add the cities where your participants are located, then drag the candidate time slider to find a window that falls within everyone's working hours. The overlap bar at the bottom of the grid shows green for full overlap, yellow for partial, and gray for no overlap.

Choose a meeting duration before downloading the calendar file. The planner resolves the reference city's selected wall time to a UTC instant using the date-specific offset, then calculates the end time by adding the chosen number of minutes. The ICS description includes the UTC start and every selected city's local date, time, and offset. If the chosen time is repeated when clocks fall back, the earlier occurrence is used; a time skipped during a spring-forward transition is rejected until you choose a valid time.

Copy share link saves the date, city list, work-hour ranges, candidate time, title, and duration in a compact URL payload. Opening that link restores the meeting in the browser. Older links that do not contain a title or duration load with the defaults “Team Meeting” and 60 minutes. Invalid, oversized, or unsupported configurations leave the current meeting unchanged and display a short status message.

Best times for global team meetings

There is rarely a perfect time for a truly global team. Common strategies include rotating the inconvenient slot across team members, scheduling "async first" with a short synchronous check-in, or anchoring on a time that overlaps for the most people even if a minority must attend off-hours.

• Americas + Europe: Early morning Eastern (8–10am ET) overlaps with early afternoon in London and evening in Berlin.
• Europe + Asia: Late afternoon in London (4–5pm GMT) is early morning in Singapore or Tokyo the next day.
• Americas + Asia: Very difficult. 7am Pacific = 11pm Tokyo (next day). Video recordings plus async follow-up are often more humane.

Common timezone gotchas

• DST transitions: Clocks change on different dates in the US, EU, and Australia. A window that works in March may not work in April.
• Half-hour and 45-minute offsets: India (UTC+5:30), Nepal (UTC+5:45), and Iran (UTC+3:30) have non-standard offsets.
• Southern hemisphere DST: Australia and New Zealand observe DST in their summer (October–March), opposite to the northern hemisphere.

World clock reference

Meeting invitation best practices

• Always include the UTC time in the invitation body: "3pm ET / 8pm UTC" - attendees in unusual timezones can convert from UTC more reliably than from a regional zone that may or may not observe DST.
• Attach a .ics calendar file: modern calendar apps display the event in each recipient's local timezone automatically when opened from a proper .ics attachment.
• Specify whose timezone applies: "3pm New York time" is clearer than "3pm EST" because EST is sometimes misused to mean ET (which is EDT during summer).