Meeting planner
Add the participants’ cities and a date; the best hours are marked. Everything is computed in your browser and kept in the link.
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Keys: ← → move the selected hour, Enter copies the summary. Click a city name to remove it.
Office-hour overlap of common city pairs
Computed from tzdata for a weekday in mid-January and mid-July. The windows move when one side changes its clocks and the other does not.
| Cities | January | July |
|---|---|---|
| New York – London | 3 h: 9:00 AM–12:00 PM in New York, 2:00 PM–5:00 PM in London | 3 h: 9:00 AM–12:00 PM in New York, 2:00 PM–5:00 PM in London |
| New York – New Delhi | no overlap of 9–5 office hours | no overlap of 9–5 office hours |
| London – New Delhi | 2 h 30 min: 9:00 AM–11:30 AM in London, 2:30 PM–5:00 PM in New Delhi | 3 h 30 min: 9:00 AM–12:30 PM in London, 1:30 PM–5:00 PM in New Delhi |
| San Francisco – London | no overlap of 9–5 office hours | no overlap of 9–5 office hours |
| Berlin – Singapore | 1 h: 9:00 AM–10:00 AM in Berlin, 4:00 PM–5:00 PM in Singapore | 2 h: 9:00 AM–11:00 AM in Berlin, 3:00 PM–5:00 PM in Singapore |
| London – Sydney | no overlap of 9–5 office hours | no overlap of 9–5 office hours |
| New York – Tokyo | no overlap of 9–5 office hours | no overlap of 9–5 office hours |
| Dubai – London | 4 h: 1:00 PM–5:00 PM in Dubai, 9:00 AM–1:00 PM in London | 5 h: 12:00 PM–5:00 PM in Dubai, 9:00 AM–2:00 PM in London |
Scheduling across time zones: what actually goes wrong
Daylight saving weeks
North America changes its clocks on the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November; Europe on the last Sundays of March and October; Australia and New Zealand in April and October. For a few weeks around each change, the usual gap between two cities is off by an hour. A weekly 4 PM London call with New York is at 11 AM in New York most of the year, but at noon during those weeks. Recurring invitations created in a calendar that knows both zones follow the change; a time written as “11 AM EST / 4 PM GMT” in an email does not. The planner marks any clock change in the week of the chosen date.
Different weekends
Not everyone works Monday to Friday. In CLDR’s locale data, which phones and computers follow, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and several Gulf states have a Friday–Saturday weekend, Iran’s weekend is Friday, and Afghanistan’s Thursday–Friday. A Monday meeting with Tel Aviv is fine; a Friday one is not. The grid greys out weekend days for each city.
The date line
For teams spanning the Pacific, a slot can fall on different calendar days: 4 PM on Monday in San Francisco is 11 AM on Tuesday in Sydney in January. The grid shows the date under each city’s hour when it differs from the first city’s.
Writing the invitation
Name the cities or give UTC offsets, not abbreviations. “15:00 London / 10:00 New York” survives forwarding; “3 PM EST” is an hour off for most of the year, because New York is on EDT from March to November. The text copied from the planner includes every city’s local time and date, and the .ics file stores the meeting in UTC so any calendar shows it correctly. See time zones explained and daylight saving time for the details.
Fairness
When no slot fits everyone’s working day, the least-bad choice usually alternates: one week early for one side, the next week late for the other. The ranking counts people inside working hours first and then penalises hours at night (before 7 AM and after 10 PM), so it prefers an early start in one city over a midnight call in another.