Meeting planners & scheduling
Meeting overlap finder
Find the one hour that works for everyone. Add your cities and read the grid — green is working hours, amber is early or late, and the highlighted columns are when the whole team is awake.
How to use the meeting overlap finder
Add every participating city
Put in one city per location on the call. Each is resolved to its own IANA zone, so the overlap accounts for daylight saving exactly as it stands on the date you are planning for.
Scan the overlap band
Each city gets a 24-hour strip, aligned to a common instant. The shaded band marks the hours that fall inside working hours everywhere at once — that band is your answer.
Check the edges
Where the band is narrow, look at which city is being asked to stretch. An 8am start in one place against a 7pm finish in another is technically an overlap and practically a bad meeting.
Pick the hour and confirm it
Choose a slot and read each city's local time for it directly off the strip. Send the invite with those local times spelled out rather than a single time and a zone abbreviation.
Finding the hour that works across time zones
A meeting across three or more zones is a constraint problem, and the hard part is that the constraints are not symmetrical. San Francisco to London has a comfortable overlap in the London afternoon. Add Sydney and the comfortable overlap disappears entirely — there is no hour at which all three are inside normal working hours, and someone has to take the call early or late.
Seeing that visually changes the conversation. Instead of a chain of "does 4pm work for you?" messages, you can see that the only candidates are 7am Pacific or 9pm Sydney, and the team can decide who absorbs the cost, or rotate it. Rotating is what well-run distributed teams actually do; the tool's job is to show you honestly that a painless slot does not exist.
The overlap also moves across the year, and not by the same amount for every pair. Between the northern and southern hemispheres the offset swings by two hours as the two sides change clocks in opposite directions, so a slot that worked in July may be an hour off in January. Planning against a specific date rather than a remembered offset avoids that.
One more thing worth building into the habit: send the invite as a calendar event with a real time zone attached, not as text. Text in an email is interpreted by a human who may get it wrong; an ICS event with a zone is interpreted by their calendar, which will not.
When you'd reach for it
Kickoff across three regions
Find whether a genuinely shared hour exists before you propose one and start a scheduling thread.
Interviewing internationally
Offer candidates slots that are reasonable in their local day rather than only in yours.
Rotating an inconvenient call
Show the team that the pain is unavoidable, then distribute it fairly across regions.
Client calls abroad
Propose two or three options you already know sit inside their business hours.
Hiring across zones
Judge, before you make an offer, how much overlap a candidate's location would really give the team.
Handover between shifts
Find the window where an outgoing and an incoming region are both online.
Questions & answers
- How does it find a good time?
- It maps every hour of your day onto each city's local clock and flags the hours where all of them fall inside standard working hours (9:00–18:00). Amber cells mark early or late hours that still work at a push.
- Can I plan for a specific date?
- The grid uses today's offsets, which is right for near-term planning. For dates across a daylight-saving change, pair it with the timezone converter to confirm.
- How many cities can I add?
- Up to eight, which is plenty for most distributed teams while keeping the grid readable.