Meeting Planner Across Time Zones

Line up 2–6 cities on a 24-hour grid, see when everyone is at work, and copy an invite with every local time.

How to Use

1. Pick a date and add the cities your team works from (up to six).
2. Adjust each city's working hours if they are not 9 to 18.
3. Green cells are working hours, yellow ones are early or late, grey ones are night.
4. Columns where every city is green are listed under the grid as the best times.
5. Click an hour in the top row to draft an invite with everyone's local time, then copy it.

Features

• Hour-by-hour grid for up to six cities
• Per-city working hours
• Shared working hours found automatically
• Copyable invite with every city's local date and time
• Daylight saving time and date-line shifts handled
• Free, no signup, cities saved locally

About This Tool

The most common mistake when a distributed team schedules a call is that somebody ends up in the middle of the night. It happens because the arithmetic is easy to get wrong and the person who sends the invite is usually the one for whom the time is perfectly reasonable. This planner lays the problem out as a grid instead. Each row is a city, each column is one hour of the day you chose, and every cell shows the local hour in that city, so you can see at a glance who is at their desk, who is just starting or just finishing, and who is asleep. Green means the hour falls inside that city's working hours, yellow means it is early or late but not the middle of the night, and grey means night. The hours are set per city, nine to eighteen by default, so a team with a late-starting office or an early-finishing one can adjust each row. A meeting is an hour long, so a slot only counts as working time if the whole hour fits. Whenever every row is green in the same column, that hour is listed under the grid as a time that works for everyone. Sometimes there is nothing to list, and the tool says so plainly. Beijing is at UTC+8 and Tokyo at UTC+9, and neither observes daylight saving time, so their offset to the US West Coast is large enough that normal working days barely touch. If you land there, widen someone's hours a little, for example one person starting early and the other staying late, and see what appears. Clicking an hour in the top row drafts a one-line invite that lists the city, the month and day, the weekday and the time for every row. The date and weekday are included because a time that is evening for you can already be tomorrow for a colleague on the far side of the world, and that is exactly where misunderstandings start. The grid is computed for the date you pick, which matters in the weeks when daylight saving time begins or ends, because the US and Europe do not switch on the same day and the gap between them temporarily shifts by an hour. Some zones are also offset by 30 or 45 minutes, and the invite shows those exact minutes. To simply convert one time between cities, use the BytePlay Time Zone Converter instead; this planner is for finding the slot in the first place. Your cities and working hours are stored only in your browser.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I find a meeting time that works in every city?

Pick the date, add every city your team works from, and set each city's working hours if they differ from 9 to 18. Any column where all rows are green is a time when everyone is inside their working hours, and those hours are listed under the grid. Click one to get an invite. If the list is empty, widen the hours of whoever can most easily start earlier or finish later, and the slots that open up will appear straight away. Remember that the grid starts from the first city in the list, so put the organiser's city first.

Why can't I find an overlap between Shanghai or Tokyo and San Francisco?

Because the offset is so large that the two working days barely meet. Beijing is at UTC+8, Tokyo at UTC+9, and neither uses daylight saving time, while the US West Coast sits many hours behind. Depending on the time of year, standard working hours leave an hour or two at the very edge of both days, and sometimes nothing at all. The tool shows an honest empty result rather than inventing a slot. A realistic fix is to stretch one side, such as an early start in one city or a late finish in the other, rather than asking one person to take the call in the middle of the night.

Do the results change during daylight saving time?

Yes, and that is why the grid is computed for the exact date you pick. The United States and Europe switch to summer time on different days, so for a few weeks the gap between cities on the two sides is an hour different from the rest of the year. China and Japan do not observe daylight saving time, so for people there it is the other side that moves. Some zones are offset by 30 or 45 minutes, and in those cities the invite shows the exact minutes. If a meeting falls near a switch, change the date and check both sides of it.

Can I paste the invite straight into a calendar or a chat?

Yes. The invite is a single line of plain text. For each city it gives the name, month and day, weekday and the time on a 24-hour clock, so nobody has to calculate their own time or guess which day is meant. It suits a chat message or an email. For a calendar event, enter the time in your own zone the usual way and paste the line into the description so the others can double-check. Copying does not send anything anywhere, and the cities and working hours you set stay in your browser.