Time Zone Meeting Planner
Find the best meeting time across multiple time zones with a colour-coded availability grid.
About this tool
Add up to six participants, each with their own time zone, and instantly see a 24-hour grid where green means business hours, yellow means early/late overlap, and red means night. The planner highlights slots where all participants are in working hours and lets you pick a specific time to see it converted into every participant's local time. A day-of-week selector lets you check any day of the working week.
How to use
- 1 Add participants by entering a name and selecting their time zone.
- 2 Select a day of the week using the day buttons.
- 3 Read the colour-coded 24-hour grid to find green overlap slots.
- 4 Click a time slot to see the exact local time for every participant.
The problem this solves: overlapping working hours, not just clocks
A world clock tells you what time it is somewhere, and a converter turns one time into another. Neither answers the question that actually decides a meeting: when are all of these people awake and at their desks at the same moment? That is what this planner is built for. It takes three to six participants, each in their own time zone, and shows you a single 24-hour grid where you can see the overlap of everyone's working day at a glance — so instead of doing six conversions in your head, you scan for the column where every row is green.
How the colour grid works
Each row is one participant. Each of the 24 columns is one hour of UTC. For every cell, the tool converts that UTC hour into the participant's local time and colours it by how reasonable that hour is to meet:
| Colour | Local time | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Green | 09:00–17:00 | Core business hours |
| Yellow | 07:00–09:00 and 17:00–21:00 | Early or late, but workable |
| Red | 21:00–07:00 | Night — avoid |
Read a column top to bottom: the more green it stacks, the better that hour suits everyone. The bottom Optimal row does this comparison for you. It shows a green checkmark only for the UTC hours where every participant falls inside core business hours (09:00–17:00 local). Where a perfect overlap is impossible, it shades the cell pale yellow if everyone is at least within the wider 07:00–21:00 window, so you can fall back to a "slightly early for one, slightly late for another" compromise.
A worked example
Take the three default participants: Alice in New York, Bob in London, and Carol in Tokyo. Scan the Optimal row and you will find the checkmarks cluster around 08:00–09:00 UTC. At 08:00 UTC that is roughly 03:00–04:00 for Alice (deep red, night) — so in fact New York and Tokyo barely overlap during business hours at all, and the planner makes that brutal reality visible immediately. The honest takeaway from the grid is that a US-East/Tokyo pair has almost no shared 9-to-5 window, and your realistic options are the yellow band: early morning for one side or late evening for the other. Click any column to open the panel and read the exact local time for each person before you commit, then send that as the proposed slot.
Daylight saving is handled for you
Offsets are computed with the browser's built-in Intl time-zone engine against a reference date for the selected weekday, so DST is applied automatically for every supported IANA zone. This matters more than people expect: London and New York shift their clocks on different dates, so the gap between them is four hours for a couple of weeks each spring and autumn rather than the usual five. Because the planner asks the system for the real offset on the chosen day, it stays correct through those transitions. It also respects half-hour and 45-minute zones — India (UTC+5:30) and Nepal (UTC+5:45) show a :30 or :45 in the local time, not a rounded-off whole hour.
How to use it well
- Pick the actual meeting day first. Use the day-of-week buttons before reading the grid. A Friday afternoon in California can be Saturday in Sydney, and the day selector keeps that straight.
- Aim for all-green, settle for all-yellow. If the Optimal row has no checkmarks, your group simply has no shared core hour — look for the column where the fewest people are red and propose that, acknowledging it is early or late for someone.
- Click before you confirm. The per-column panel spells out each person's local clock time. Pasting "14:00 UTC = 09:00 New York / 15:00 Paris / 23:00 Tokyo" into the invite removes all ambiguity.
- Rotate the pain. When no slot is comfortable for everyone, use the grid across recurring meetings to take turns: an early start for the Asia-Pacific members one week, a late finish for the Americas the next.
Common mistakes
- Assuming the green band is fixed across the week. It is not — for zones near the international date line, a chosen weekday changes which calendar day a UTC hour lands on, shifting who is asleep. Re-check the grid if you move the meeting to a different day.
- Overloading the grid. The tool caps participants at six on purpose; beyond that the columns become too dense to compare quickly. For large groups, plan around the few hardest time zones and let the rest fall into place.
- Forgetting whose business hours are being scored. The Optimal row uses a uniform 09:00–17:00 definition of "business hours" for everyone. If a participant genuinely starts at 10:00 or works a split shift, treat the checkmarks as guidance and confirm with them directly.
Privacy note
All of the time-zone maths runs in your browser through the standard Intl API. Participant names and zones are never sent anywhere, so you can plan a confidential meeting without anything leaving your device.