Meeting timezone planner

Scheduling a call between colleagues in San Francisco, London and Bangalore means finding the narrow window when everyone is awake and at work. This planner lines up the hours of several time zones side by side and highlights where working hours overlap, so you can pick a time without mental arithmetic.

How to use it

1. Add the time zones or cities of all participants.
2. Set the working hours you want to respect, for example 09:00 to 18:00.
3. Review the overlap and choose a slot.
4. Share the time in each participant's local time to avoid confusion.

Worked example

A team in New York (UTC-5 in winter), London (UTC+0) and Bangalore (UTC+5:30), each working 09:00 to 18:00:

• London 09:00 to 18:00 is New York 04:00 to 13:00 and Bangalore 14:30 to 23:30.
• With everyone keeping strict hours there is no common overlap: New York starts at 14:00 London time, when Bangalore has already finished its day at 18:00 local time (12:30 London).
• A practical compromise is 14:00 London = 09:00 New York = 19:30 Bangalore, asking the Bangalore team to stay slightly late.

Tips for distributed teams

• Rotate the inconvenient slot so the same region is not always on early or late calls.
• Watch daylight saving dates. The US and Europe switch on different weekends, so for one to three weeks a year the gap between New York and London is 4 hours instead of 5. India does not observe DST at all.
• Use UTC in written schedules or calendar invites, which convert automatically.
• Prefer asynchronous updates when the overlap is very small; reserve live meetings for decisions.