Meeting planner
Add up to eight cities and find the hours where everyone is still at their desk. The first city in the list is the base, every row is shown against its clock.
Scheduling across a distributed team
The practical limit on a single synchronous meeting is roughly an eight-hour spread. Up to that point there is usually at least one hour inside everyone’s working day. Beyond it, Los Angeles with Mumbai, or London with Auckland, the overlap disappears and someone has to move.
Where no overlap exists, the fairest pattern is to rotate the inconvenience rather than always defaulting to the headquarters time zone. Recording the session and writing a summary afterwards tends to be more effective than forcing a 6:00am start on the same people every week.
One caution: daylight saving does not move in step across the world. A recurring weekly slot that works all winter can quietly drift by an hour in March, and again in October. If you set up a repeating invitation, check it after each transition.
Meeting planning, questions
- How do I find a meeting time that works across time zones?
- Add each participant’s city to the planner. The grid shades every hour by whether it falls inside business hours, waking hours or the middle of the night for that location, and the columns highlighted at the top are the hours that work for everyone simultaneously.
- What counts as business hours here?
- The planner treats 09:00 to 17:00 local time as business hours and 07:00 to 22:00 as waking hours. These are conventions rather than rules, plenty of teams start earlier or finish later, so treat the shading as a guide.
- What if there is no overlap at all?
- For pairings like California and India there is no hour where both sides are inside 09:00-17:00. In that case someone has to take an early or late call, and the fairest approach is usually to alternate which side absorbs it. The amber band shows hours when both parties are at least awake.