Meeting Planner

Reading the grid

Each row is a city and each of the twenty four columns is one hour of the chosen day. The number inside a cell is the local hour in that city at that moment, so a row read left to right is that person's day, and a column read top to bottom is one instant seen by everybody at once. Finding a meeting time means finding a good column, which is why the tool is a grid and not a list.

The colours run on a single scale rather than four separate categories. Dark cells are the middle of the night, warm cells are early morning or evening, pale green is the working day, and a solid green column is the thing you are looking for: an hour that falls inside nine to six for every city on the board. The line above the grid counts those columns, so you know immediately whether the meeting is easy, tight, or impossible.

Click any column and the exact local time appears for each city underneath, with the date. That panel is the part worth copying into an invitation, because it is the form the answer has to take when you write it down for other people.

When there is no good time, which is often

Spread a team across more than about eight hours of longitude and a perfect column stops existing. San Francisco, London and Singapore have no hour that is inside working hours in all three, and no tool can invent one. What the grid does instead is show you the shape of the compromise: which hour costs the least, and who pays for it.

That is a more useful answer than a refusal. A 7am start in San Francisco to catch a 3pm in London and a 10pm in Singapore is a real option, and seeing it laid out makes the cost visible to the person deciding rather than discovered later by the person who has to take the call from their kitchen. If a meeting is going to be uncomfortable for somebody, the least you can do is know who, and rotate it next time.

Daylight saving, and the fortnight that catches everyone

The grid is calculated for the date you pick, not for today, and that distinction is the whole reason to use a tool rather than arithmetic. The gap between London and New York is five hours for most of the year. For about two weeks each spring and autumn it is four, because the United States changes its clocks on the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November while the United Kingdom and the European Union change on the last Sundays of March and October.

Anybody planning a recurring meeting with a memorised offset is wrong for those two weeks, twice a year, and usually finds out when half the participants arrive an hour early. The southern hemisphere inverts the whole thing: while Europe is moving into summer time, Australia is coming out of it, so the London to Sydney gap swings across a three hour range over the year. Plenty of places do not observe it at all, including India, Japan, most of Africa and Arizona but not the rest of the United States.

The dates that are not the same date

A cell with a coloured underline is on a different calendar day from the first city on your board. Plan a call between London and Auckland and most of your grid is on tomorrow, which is the single most common mistake in a handwritten invitation. The colour is there because "Tuesday 3pm" is ambiguous the moment two people are on different Tuesdays.

The rule when writing it down is to name the city with the time, or better, to send the link. The cities, the date and the hour you clicked are all carried in the address of this page, so the person who opens it sees the same grid rather than a number they have to trust.

Why nine to six, and nothing to configure

The working window is fixed at 9am to 6pm local everywhere. That is blunt, and it is a choice rather than an omission. The moment the window becomes a setting, the tool grows a form, and a question that should be answered in four seconds becomes a configuration exercise. Almost nobody wants to specify office hours per city before they can see a grid.

The numbers are always visible inside the cells, so a team that works to different hours can simply read them and ignore the colours. The colouring is a hint about where to look first, not a verdict about what is allowed.

What this does not do

It does not read anybody's calendar, so it cannot tell you who is already busy. It finds hours that are reasonable in principle, which is the half of the problem that does not need access to your organisation's data. Pair it with whatever calendar you already use.

For converting one specific moment rather than searching a whole day, the time zone converter is the smaller tool. To watch the current time in several cities at once, use the world clock. To count down to the meeting once it is booked, the countdown takes a date and gives you a link you can send with it.