Meeting Time Planner

Scheduling a meeting across three time zones means doing math for each participant in your head, accounting for DST mismatches and the fact that nobody actually wants a meeting at 6am their time.

Enter participants and their time zones, and the planner shows a horizontal grid of working hours overlapping across all of them. Highlighted bands show where everyone's normal day overlaps; dimmed bands show where one or more people would be working outside their preferred hours. You can pick a specific date to handle DST transitions correctly.

The most useful output is the 'fairness' indicator — if you keep scheduling at a time that's mid-day for you and 9pm for someone else, that pattern shows up. For globally distributed teams, rotating the meeting time so the burden of awkward hours gets shared rather than dumped on one timezone is a small thing that makes a real difference.

The tool builds a 24-hour grid for each participant in their local time, then aligns them to a common UTC reference. Each participant's working hours are shaded; intersections show where overlaps exist. DST transitions are handled by computing each participant's local offset from UTC for the specific date you're scheduling — not a fixed offset, because zones like America/New_York shift between -5:00 (EST) and -4:00 (EDT) twice a year, and the shift days don't all align across hemispheres.

The pain this addresses: scheduling for distributed teams. Three people in San Francisco, London, and Tokyo have a maximum overlap of about an hour per day, and that hour is awful for someone (early morning Tokyo, late evening London, early morning SF). Adding a fourth person in Berlin shrinks the window further. Calendar tools show free/busy but don't surface the burden distribution — you can see that 7am Tokyo works for everyone, but you don't see that you've scheduled this meeting at 7am Tokyo every week for six months. The planner makes the imbalance visible.

Worked example: participants in PST, EST, GMT, IST, JST. Working hours 9am-5pm local. The tool finds overlaps. The only window where all five are within working hours is 7-8 AM PST = 10-11 AM EST = 3-4 PM GMT = 8:30-9:30 PM IST = 12-1 AM JST. The JST participant is being asked to take a meeting after midnight; the IST participant is doing it after dinner. There's no all-fair time. The 'fairness' indicator highlights this so you can rotate weekly between two windows that each burden a different timezone.

Where DST creates real problems: the two-week period in March/November when US has changed but Europe hasn't (or vice versa) shifts the offset between New York and London by an hour temporarily. Standing recurring meetings get one or both participants showing up at the wrong time during these windows. The planner shows the actual offset for the specific date, so you can see the temporary skew. Calendar apps usually handle this correctly for one-off invites; for recurring series, double-check the times around DST boundaries to avoid awkward 'I thought it was at 3' moments.