Time Zone Meeting Planner

Coordinating meetings across time zones is one of the most common challenges for global teams, remote workers, and international businesses. Getting the time wrong means some team members are awake at 3 AM or miss meetings entirely.

Understanding UTC

UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) is the world’s time standard, and every time zone is expressed as an offset from it. For example:

• New York (EST): UTC−5 (UTC−4 in daylight saving)
• London (GMT/BST): UTC±0 (UTC+1 in summer)
• Paris (CET/CEST): UTC+1 (UTC+2 in summer)
• Dubai (GST): UTC+4 (no daylight saving)
• Mumbai (IST): UTC+5:30
• Singapore (SGT): UTC+8
• Tokyo (JST): UTC+9 (no daylight saving)
• Sydney (AEST/AEDT): UTC+10 (UTC+11 in summer)

Major Time Zone Reference

The offsets in the dropdowns are standard (winter) offsets. If a participant is on summer time right now, their real offset is an hour higher than the list says. Brazil scrapped daylight saving in 2019 and Russia in 2014, so São Paulo and Moscow no longer move at all.

The “Friendly Hours” Problem

The challenge is finding a time that falls within normal working hours for everyone. This page defines that as 09:00 to 17:00 at both ends, and uses the same definition in the panel, in the shared-window line and in the chart’s darkest bars. Nine to five is narrower than some people work, so treat an hour just outside it as awkward rather than impossible.

Some pairings simply have no answer. New York and Tokyo are 14 hours apart in winter and 13 in summer, so nine in the morning in New York is eleven at night in Tokyo, and there is no hour of the day that is civilised at both ends. The page will say so in as many words, and the chart shows a flat run of pale bars across the middle. That is the honest result rather than a failure to find one.

Best Practice for Difficult Combinations

When there is no overlap, rotate the inconvenient time across the team instead of always handing it to the same person, which in practice means the most junior one. Record the meeting and post the recording. And be specific about which hour is being asked for: an invitation that says “9 AM” without naming a zone is how somebody ends up dialling in at two in the morning.