Time Zone Meeting Planner
Use our free tool to find the perfect meeting time across any time zones. The planner handles all daylight savings shifts and tracks working hours for you. Simply add your locations, compare availability, and share the results in one click.
What is a time zone meeting planner for?
Our tool is meant to provide people with an easy and simple way to plan meetings between time zones. Our team had struggled with this issue and could not find a good solution, so we decided to make one.
The general idea is to help you visualize the gap. Instead of doing math in your head, the tool aligns everyone’s day side-by-side, tracking local working hours in real-time. By having these schedules lined up, the "sweet spot" for a meeting is easy to find.
How do I use the time zone meeting planner?
Firstly, users have the option to change the setting to a 12- or 24-hour format. This can be done with the selector at the top of the tool. Under that selector, you will see a search bar used to find different locations to add. Here, you can search for a city and click it to add it to the planner. Once added, the tool will automatically sort it by the location's UTC offset. For example, New York has an offset of -5 and London has an offset of +0, so New York will appear first. This makes it easier since areas within the same time zone will be grouped together.
Then, for each row, the hours of the day are color-coded to match that zone's working hours. Green means that it is during normal working hours, light gray means that the person is likely to be awake during those hours, and dark gray means that the person is likely to be sleeping. Using this information, it becomes very clear when the best time for a meeting is. Simply find a column that has the most green or light gray times in it.
Lastly, you also have the option to easily share your settings with other users. Simply click the "Copy Link" button. This will copy a URL that has your time zones and time format encoded. Then, when someone uses that link, they will automatically get the same time zones. This information is also saved to your local browser, so you do not need to re-enter the zones each time you return to use the tool.
Benefits of our tool
The first major benefit that we wanted to add was better mobile support. A lot of people want to check their schedules on their phones, and we were unable to find a working mobile option. As such, that was a large focus. The tool is designed to work on any mobile device and be perfectly usable.
Likewise, the tool is also online and does not require a login. This was the second issue that we ran into. Many other apps or websites would require a download or login to use. This becomes a headache for sharing the planner, as the other user is now forced to make an account just to see the meeting times. So, with our tool, you just need to share the planner link and anyone is able to use it right away.
Lastly is the tool's unique color scheme. To make the time zones easier to visualize, we used a custom color scheme to highlight the time zones' working hours, awake hours, and sleeping hours. You don’t even need to look at the numbers to know when a good time for a meeting will be.