Meeting Planner

Scheduling across time zones, without the spreadsheet

The hardest part of remote work isn't the work — it's finding a meeting time that doesn't ask someone to join at 5 AM. The Meeting Planner solves this visually: each city gets a 24-hour band coloured by typical working hours, early/late edges, and sleeping hours. Click any column to lock a candidate meeting time and see exactly what it would mean for each participant.

What the colours mean

• Green — standard working hours, 9 AM to 6 PM in that city.
• Orange — early morning (7 to 9 AM) or evening (6 to 10 PM). Workable, but outside core hours.
• Dark — sleeping hours, 10 PM to 7 AM. Don't ask people to take meetings here unless it's genuinely urgent.

If every cell in a column is green, you've found an ideal meeting time — the detail panel confirms "Works for everyone." If even one cell is orange or dark, the panel warns you, so you can hunt for a better column or accept the trade-off knowingly.

Tips for cross-timezone meetings

• Rotate the pain. If you regularly meet with someone many time zones away and a perfect overlap doesn't exist, alternate who takes the early or late slot.
• Build a buffer for daylight saving. Twice a year the overlap between regions can shift by an hour — sometimes for a few weeks because countries change their clocks on different dates. The planner adjusts automatically once the change happens, but invitations sent in advance can land at the wrong time.
• Include a GMT/UTC time in calendar invites. When inviting people in unfamiliar zones, adding the universal reference ("3 PM London / 10 AM New York / 14:00 GMT") removes any ambiguity.
• Mind the date. A 4 PM meeting in London on Friday is 1 AM Saturday in Tokyo. Check the detail panel's day label to avoid scheduling someone's "Friday" meeting on their Saturday morning.

When the Meeting Planner saves the most time

The grid layout pays off most when you're juggling more than two zones or when the gap is awkward enough that mental conversion stops being reliable. Common scenarios:

• Cross-continental team standups spanning four or more cities — the column where every cell is green is your one safe hour, and it's usually narrower than people expect.
• Customer success calls with international clients — booking a slot that's late-but-acceptable for them beats a slot that's mid-morning for you and 1 AM for them.
• Recording podcasts with co-hosts in different countries — late-night recordings hurt audio quality after the first hour; pick the slot where nobody is past their second wind.
• Family video calls with relatives who emigrated to other continents — Sunday afternoon in London is breakfast time in Sydney and bedtime in Toronto; the grid makes the trade visible.
• Investor pitches when the founder and co-founder are in different cities and need to look fresh, not jet-lagged-fresh.
• Coordinating launch-day Slack syncs ahead of a global product release.
• Booking 1:1 mentoring sessions with someone several zones away — recurring meetings benefit most from rotating the painful slot every few sessions.

Reading a tricky overlap

Some pairings simply don't have a clean overlap. Sydney and San Francisco share only one or two awkward hours; London and Auckland share none during winter. When that happens, the planner shows the least-bad option rather than pretending it's fine:

• All-orange columns (early or late for everyone) are usually preferable to one-green, one-dark — shared inconvenience beats one person bearing it alone.
• Half-and-half columns deserve a flag — whoever takes the late slot this time should take the early slot next time. The detail panel makes it easy to see who you're asking to stay up.
• Day labels matter. Each cell shows which calendar day it belongs to. A 4 PM Friday meeting in London is Saturday morning in Tokyo — useful to know before you call it a "Friday afternoon" sync.
• DST transition windows last about two weeks each spring and autumn, when London and New York's daylight-saving shifts don't align. Expect overlap to compress by an hour during those windows for recurring meetings.

A worked example: a four-city standup

Say you're setting up a daily standup for a team in London, New York, Bangalore, and Sydney. Add all four cities and the grid fills with colour. London and New York overlap easily in the afternoon, but Bangalore is five and a half hours ahead of London, and Sydney is roughly five ahead of Bangalore again — so the "everyone awake" band is narrow. Scanning the columns, the only hour with no dark, sleeping cells lands around 8:00 AM London time: mid-afternoon in Bangalore, early evening in Sydney, and very early morning in New York. It isn't perfect for New York, but it's the single best compromise, and the grid makes that obvious in seconds rather than after three rounds of "does this work for you?" emails. If even that column has one orange or dark cell, the honest move is to rotate the pain — take the awkward hour yourself this month and hand it to someone else next. The planner's job isn't to invent an overlap that doesn't exist; it's to show you the least-bad option clearly enough that everyone agrees to it.