Overlapping hours · several cities
Meeting Planner
Add the cities involved and see the whole day at once, colour-coded by whether each hour is reasonable there. The best column is the one with the most green.
Working across zones
Making Distributed Meetings Bearable
Rotate the Pain
If one office always takes the six in the morning slot, that office will eventually stop attending properly. Alternating which region gets the awkward hour costs everyone a little and costs one group a lot less.
Ask Whether It Needs to Be Live
A meeting with no overlapping hours is a meeting that wants to be a written update. Recording a short video and collecting comments asynchronously beats a call at eleven at night for a third of the participants.
Send a Calendar Invitation
Not a time in a message. A calendar entry carries the zone and converts for each attendee automatically, which eliminates the single most common cause of somebody joining an hour out.
Watch the Changeover Weeks
A recurring meeting booked in one zone quietly moves for everyone in another when only one of them changes clocks. Check the grid again in late March and late October rather than assuming last month's slot still works.
Answers
Meeting Planner Questions
Reading the grid, working hours, weekends and what to do with no overlap.
How do I read the grid?
Each row is a city and each column is one hour of your own day. Green means that hour falls inside normal working hours there, amber means early or late but survivable, and red means the middle of the night. The column with the most green is the hour that costs the fewest people the least.
What counts as working hours?
Nine in the morning to five in the evening by default, which you can change. Working days vary too: the grid marks weekends, and in much of the Middle East and North Africa the weekend falls on Friday and Saturday rather than Saturday and Sunday.
Why is there no green column at all sometimes?
Because some combinations genuinely have no overlap. London and Auckland share almost no working day, and adding a third city on the American west coast removes what little is left. When that happens the honest answer is that somebody has to take an inconvenient hour, and the fairest approach is to rotate who.
Does it handle daylight saving?
Yes, for the date you choose rather than for today. That matters most during March, April, October and November, when different countries change on different weekends and the usual gap between two cities is temporarily different from normal.
Should I book the meeting in UTC?
Write UTC in the message, but send an actual calendar invitation. A calendar converts automatically for each attendee's own zone, which removes the whole class of error. Times typed into a chat message do not.
What about people who do not work nine to five?
Change the hours to match reality. Shift workers, parents doing school runs and people on compressed weeks all have working days that do not fit the default. The grid is only as good as the hours you give it.
How many cities can I compare?
As many as you add, though beyond six or seven rows the grid stops being readable and the answer is usually that no good hour exists. At that point the useful question changes from when to meet to whether the meeting needs to be live at all.