Meeting Planner

Meeting Planner — How to Schedule Meetings Across Time Zones

Here is the scenario: you need to find a single one-hour window that works for four people — one in New York, one in London, one in Singapore, and one in Vancouver. You open a world clock, start doing mental arithmetic, remember that the UK might be on BST right now and Singapore is UTC+8 year-round, calculate the differences, and immediately get confused about whether Singapore is ahead or behind and by how much. You try three or four different time slots, talk yourself into 9am New York time, and then realise that is 10pm in Singapore — which is technically still before midnight but is definitely not what anyone would call a reasonable meeting hour.

This is the daily reality for global teams. The math is not that hard, but the mental load of doing it repeatedly across multiple participants — while tracking DST, checking whether someone is travelling, and not wanting to be the person who accidentally books a 5am call — adds up to something genuinely frustrating. A meeting planner takes that load off your plate entirely. Add your participants, pick a date, and see the heatmap. No arithmetic required.

Why Time Zone Scheduling Is Hard

Three things make global scheduling harder than it should be:

DST transitions happen at different times in different countries. The United States moves its clocks in March and November. The European Union follows a different schedule — typically the last Sunday in March and last Sunday in October. Australia flips in the Southern Hemisphere's spring (October) and autumn (April). Japan and India do not change clocks at all. This means that a gap you calculated last week may have shifted by an hour this week, with no obvious notification.

Half-hour and quarter-hour offsets exist. India is UTC+5:30. Nepal is UTC+5:45 — the only country in the world on a 45-minute offset. Iran is UTC+3:30. These offsets do not fit neatly into the "N hours ahead or behind" mental model most people use. When you are calculating "what time is 10am New York in Mumbai," the 30-minute offset introduces a rounding problem that trips people up constantly. The answer is 8:30pm Mumbai time in winter and 7:30pm in summer — two different answers depending on whether the US is currently observing DST.

Work culture varies by city. A 9am–6pm working day assumption does not hold everywhere. Many cities in the Middle East observe a Sunday–Thursday work week, with Friday and Saturday as the weekend. Some European offices are strictly off after 5pm and would consider a 5:30pm calendar invite unusual. Some Asian tech teams routinely work until 8pm or 9pm. The "green zone" for your heatmap is a reasonable 9am–6pm approximation — but knowing your participants' actual cultural norms is important context that no tool can fully automate.

How to Use This Meeting Planner

Using the planner takes less than a minute:

1. Set the date. The planner defaults to today. Change it to the date of your meeting to get DST-accurate local times for that specific day.
2. Add participants. Click "Add participant" and search by city name. You can add up to 6 participants. The planner starts with New York, London, and Singapore as defaults — remove or change any of them.
3. Read the heatmap. Each row is a UTC hour from 7am to 9pm. Each column is a participant's city. Green cells mean that person is in working hours (9am–6pm local). Amber means some participants are available. Red means no one is in working hours for that UTC hour.
4. Pick from Best 3 times. Below the heatmap, the planner surfaces the top three UTC hours ranked by how many participants are in working hours. Each card shows the local time for every participant, so you can immediately see "9am New York = 2pm London = 9pm Singapore" without doing any math.
5. Copy the invite text. Click "Copy invite text" on any time slot to copy a pre-formatted string like "Best meeting time: 9:00 AM in New York (Mon, May 25) · 2:00 PM in London (Mon, May 25) · 9:00 PM in Singapore (Mon, May 25)" — ready to paste into Slack, email, or a calendar invite description.
6. Share the setup. Click "Share setup" to copy a URL that encodes your participant cities and date. Anyone who opens that link sees the same heatmap — useful for looping in a teammate who also needs to check the overlap.

Best Meeting Times for Common Global Team Combinations

Here are the practical overlap windows for the most common global team pairings. All times are approximate and assume a 9am–6pm working day. Actual DST-adjusted times will vary by date — use the planner above for precise calculations.

The hardest pairings are anything that spans the Pacific — US West Coast to East Asia — and anything that includes both North America and Australia simultaneously. For these combinations, asynchronous communication (see tips below) is often the more sustainable long-term answer.

Meeting Planner vs Scheduling Tools — Understanding the Difference

A meeting planner and a scheduling tool are complementary, not competing. They solve different parts of the same problem.

A meeting planner (like this one) is a decision support tool. It answers the question "When can we all meet?" It takes a set of participants and a date and shows you the possible windows. It does not know anyone's actual calendar — it only knows working hour conventions. It is fast, requires no accounts, and takes 30 seconds to run.

A scheduling tool like Calendly handles the next step: actually booking the meeting. It syncs with your Google Calendar or Outlook, reads your real availability, lets the invitee pick from your open slots, sends automated confirmation emails, handles reminders, and creates the calendar event. It shows the invitee your available times in their local timezone automatically — so a slot you offer at "9am EST" appears as "2pm GMT" to your London contact without anyone doing manual conversion.

The workflow for global teams: use this planner to identify the viable window (e.g., "we can meet 9am–11am EST"), then configure Calendly to offer slots only in that window, and share the link. The person you are meeting clicks, sees available times in their local timezone, and books. No back-and-forth. No timezone math. No double-bookings.

If you run a lot of external meetings — client calls, sales demos, interviews — a scheduling tool pays for itself quickly in time saved on the email back-and-forth. Calendly offers a free tier that covers basic one-on-one scheduling, and paid plans add team scheduling, routing forms, and payment collection.

Tips for Async-First Teams

When a good overlap window does not exist — or when your team has collectively decided that meetings are expensive — async communication becomes the primary mode. Here is what works:

• Record video updates instead of calling. Tools like Loom let you record a 5-minute screen + camera video. Your Singapore colleague watches it at their 9am; your London team watches it at their 2pm. Everyone gets the same update, no one stays up late, and the recording is searchable forever. This replaces the weekly status meeting for most teams.
• Write decisions in Notion or Confluence, not Slack. Slack messages disappear into scroll. A short decision doc ("We chose option B because X. Owners: Alice (design), Bob (eng). Deadline: June 3.") takes five minutes to write and eliminates three days of "wait, what did we decide?" conversation.
• Define your overlap window clearly. If you do have a 2-hour window (e.g., 9am–11am EST), protect it fiercely. Use it only for decisions that genuinely cannot be made async. Do not fill it with status updates — those belong in docs.
• Rotate the inconvenient time slot. If 9am EST is always the meeting time, Singapore is always on at 10pm. That is unfair over time. Rotate: alternate between an EST-friendly slot and an SGT-friendly slot. Document which person takes the "night shift" for each recurring meeting.
• Use UTC for all written timestamps. "Let's ship this by 18:00 UTC on June 3" is unambiguous for everyone. "Let's ship this by 6pm Friday" is ambiguous — whose Friday, whose 6pm? This is especially important for release windows and incident response.
• Block your team's overlap window in calendar as "Deep Work." If you want people to actually be available during the overlap, prevent the window from getting booked up with individual calls. Protect it at the team level.

Other Free Time Zone Tools

Need more time zone help? These free tools are also available on this site:

• World Clock — live time in 50+ cities, updating every second. Add and remove cities, toggle 12h/24h format.
• Timezone Converter — enter a specific time in one city and see what time it is in another, with a visual 24h timeline showing work and sleep hour overlap.

Frequently Asked Questions