Office and Time, free, by Pivotal Labs
Find the hour that works for everyone, wherever they are
Add two to five locations and see everyone's working hours as one colour coded grid, so the overlap is obvious rather than calculated. It runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
Loading Meeting Time Zone Planner...
What Meeting Time Zone Planner does
Add two to five locations and see a colour-coded grid of everyone’s working hours, find the overlap, copy it, or download an invite. Nothing leaves your browser.
Doing this job well
Time zone arithmetic is deceptively easy to get wrong, and the errors are not evenly distributed. They land on whoever is furthest from whoever organised the meeting, which over time is a fairness problem rather than a scheduling one. The person who always takes the seven in the morning call is usually the person with the least say in when it happens.
Seeing it as a grid rather than working it out changes the conversation. Once everyone's working hours are laid side by side, the overlap is either there or it is not, and if it is not, the honest options become visible: rotate who takes the awkward slot, split into two calls, or accept that this should have been written down instead.
Daylight saving is where confident arithmetic comes unstuck, because the transitions do not happen on the same date everywhere. Between mid March and early April, and again in the autumn, the gap between the UK and much of the United States changes for a fortnight, and a recurring meeting set outside that window silently moves for everyone in it. Anything scheduled in those weeks deserves checking rather than assuming.
The related mistake is treating working hours as universal. Nine to five is a convention, not a fact: lunch is a different length and a different time in different places, Friday afternoons mean different things, and in some countries the working week does not start on Monday. A grid that shows real availability rather than an assumed block avoids proposing a slot that is technically inside working hours and socially impossible.
For anything recurring, the useful discipline is to fix the meeting in one canonical zone and let the others follow, rather than agreeing a time in each participant's local terms. That way there is one clock to argue with when the clocks change, rather than five.
Everything runs in your browser. There is no account and nothing sent anywhere, which for a page that knows who you are meeting and where they are seems like the right arrangement.
Common questions
How many locations can I compare?
Two to five, which covers most real meetings. Beyond that the honest answer is usually that it should not be a meeting.
Does it handle daylight saving?
Yes, and it is worth paying attention in mid March and late October, when different countries change on different dates and a recurring meeting can silently move.
Can I get an invite out of it?
Yes, you can copy the overlap or download an invite once you have picked a slot.
Are working hours assumed to be nine to five?
They are a starting point you can change. Nine to five is a convention rather than a fact, and a slot can be inside working hours and still socially impossible.
Is anything uploaded?
No. It runs entirely in your browser, which seems right for a page that knows who you are meeting and where.
Related applets
Built by Pivotal Labs
We build software, and this is a small piece of it.
Pivotal Labs is a software development and product management team. The applets on this site are the offcuts, the small things we build for ourselves and give away. The work we are paid for looks rather different.
See what Labs buildsWhen the browser tab is not enough
A one-off clean-up is a job for an applet. Doing it the same way every month, across systems that disagree with each other, is a job for customer journey workshops.
Further reading
Scaled CS: what it actually means and when you need it
Automation in CS: Where It Helps, and Where It Backfires
CS and Product: Closing the Feedback Loop That Usually Stays Open
The QBR Format That Fits Nobody
The cheapest user research happens before you build anything
