Meeting planner across time zones
Add the cities your team is in and pick a date. Green shows working hours; marked columns are hours that suit everyone. Runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
Hours that suit everyone
Selected time
How to use the meeting planner
- Your own time zone is added first. Type a city (or a time zone name such as
Asia/Singapore) and press Add for each place people are joining from. - Pick the meeting date. Offsets are worked out for that date, including daylight saving time.
- Set working hours. The default is 9:00 to 17:00 local time in every city.
- Read across the grid: green cells are working hours, white are waking hours outside work, grey is night. Columns marked with a check are hours when everyone is in working hours.
- Click an hour to select it. The panel lists that moment in every city, ready to copy into an invitation, and Copy link shares the whole plan.
The first city is the "home" row: columns follow its hours from midnight to midnight. Use Make home on another row to plan from that city's day instead.
Tips for scheduling across time zones
- Always write the time zone in the invite. Calendar apps convert automatically, but times pasted into chat or email do not. Copy times gives you every city's local time in one block.
- Share the pain. If one region always joins at 7 a.m. or 9 p.m., rotate a recurring meeting's time every few weeks.
- Avoid Monday mornings and Friday afternoons across big gaps: Friday afternoon in California is already Saturday in Australia and New Zealand.
- Keep it short when the overlap is short. A one-hour overlap is better used for decisions than status updates; share updates in writing.
- Record for the people who cannot make it. When there is no good slot for everyone, a recording and notes let the others catch up in their own morning. Get everyone's consent first.
Time zones, offsets and daylight saving
A time zone is more than an offset from UTC. Names like America/New_York and Europe/Berlin
come from the IANA time zone database, which records each region's offset and its daylight saving rules over time.
Your browser ships with this database, and the planner uses it through the standard Intl API, so
nothing is looked up online.
Daylight saving is the usual reason meeting times go wrong. In the United States clocks change on the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November; in the European Union they change on the last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October. For a few weeks each year the gap between New York and London is four hours instead of five. Many places, including most of Asia, Africa and the US state of Arizona (except the Navajo Nation), do not use daylight saving at all, and some zones, like India's, sit on half-hour offsets.
Picking the date matters
Because offsets change, always check the actual meeting date rather than today. On the day clocks change in the home city, that day has 23 or 25 hours, and the grid shows the jump in the home row.
After you have found the time
Booking tools such as Calendly let people pick from your free slots in their own time zone, and Zoom vs Teams compares where to hold the call. For the meeting itself, our meeting notes template keeps everyone on the same page. Hark records and transcribes the meeting on your own computer, so colleagues in an awkward time zone can read what was decided when their day starts. Converting timestamps for developers? Try the Unix timestamp converter.
Frequently asked questions
How do I find a meeting time across time zones? +
Add each participant's city, pick the meeting date, and set the working hours you want to respect. The planner lines up every city's local time hour by hour, shades working hours green and marks the hours when everyone is inside working hours. Click an hour to see it in every city and copy the details for your invitation.
What is the best time for a meeting between the US and Europe? +
Usually the US morning, which is the European afternoon. For New York and London, 9 a.m. to noon in New York is 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. in London for most of the year. For the US West Coast and continental Europe the overlap is small or none, so someone joins early or late. Add your exact cities to see the real overlap for your date.
Does the meeting planner handle daylight saving time? +
Yes. It uses your browser's built-in time zone database, which includes daylight saving rules, and calculates offsets for the exact date you pick. That matters because the US and Europe change their clocks on different weekends, so the gap between them is an hour different for a few weeks each spring and autumn.
What if there is no time when everyone is in working hours? +
The planner then suggests the hours where the most people are inside working hours. Rotating the inconvenient slot between regions, recording the meeting for people who cannot attend, or splitting it into two regional meetings are common fixes.
Can I share the meeting planner with my team? +
Yes. Your cities, date, working hours and selected time are saved in the page address. Press Copy link and send it; anyone who opens it sees the same grid. Nothing is stored on our servers.
Why is a time zone shown as GMT+1 instead of a name like CET? +
Abbreviations come from your browser, and many browsers only have well-known abbreviations for some regions. Where they do not, they show the offset from UTC instead. The offset is always correct for the date you picked.
Related
- Meeting cost calculator See what a meeting costs per minute, per meeting and per year.
- Microphone test Check your mic works and see its level, right in the browser.
- Webcam test Check your camera before a call: picture, resolution and frame rate.
- Speech timer Time a speech or presentation with green, yellow and red cues.
- Unix timestamp converter Convert Unix timestamps to dates and back, in any time zone.
- Online stopwatch A full-screen stopwatch with laps that keeps running in the background.
Record, transcribe and remember every meeting
Hark records your calls on your own computer, transcribes them privately, and learns who is speaking. Free forever, with a 2-day preview of AI meeting notes.