Meeting Planner
Find the best time to schedule a meeting across multiple time zones.
Remote and hybrid work has transformed the way teams collaborate, but scheduling meetings across multiple time zones remains one of the most frustrating parts of distributed work. A 2 PM call that suits London perfectly lands at 6 AM in San Francisco and 10 PM in Tokyo, turning a simple calendar invite into a puzzle of clashing schedules and unhappy participants. Daylight saving time makes the problem even worse, because the offset between two cities can shift by an hour or even two at different times of the year, and not every country changes clocks on the same date. A meeting that worked last month might now start an hour too early for half the team.
Our free Meeting Planner takes the guesswork out of international scheduling. Add up to six cities, pick a date, and the tool instantly generates a 24-hour time grid showing each city's local time with colour-coded cells. Green marks standard working hours, red highlights unsociable hours, and the best-window detector scans every hour to find slots where the most participants are in comfortable working hours. Once you find the right time, one click copies a formatted summary listing every city's local time, ready to paste into an email or calendar invite. All calculations use the browser's built-in Intl API, which automatically handles daylight saving transitions and covers every IANA time zone in the world, so results are always accurate without any manual offset entry.
How the Meeting Planner Works
This tool uses the Intl API built into modern browsers to convert times between IANA time zones with full DST awareness. The colour-coded grid and best-window detection make it easy to find a time that works for everyone.
How to Use This Planner
- Select a date using the date picker. The tool defaults to today but you can choose any future date. This matters because DST transitions can shift offsets on different dates.
- Add your cities by clicking "+ Add City" and selecting a time zone from the dropdown. You can search by typing a city name. Add up to six cities to compare.
- Read the time grid. Each row represents a city and each column represents an hour anchored to the first city. Green cells are working hours (9 AM to 6 PM), yellow cells are transition hours (8-9 AM, 6-8 PM), and red cells are unsociable hours (before 8 AM or after 8 PM).
- Check the best window shown below the grid. The planner automatically finds the hours where the most cities are in working hours and recommends the best slot.
- Click any hour column to select it. The summary panel shows the exact local time for each city. Click "Copy Meeting Time" to copy a formatted message to your clipboard.
How It Works
The planner creates a Date object for each hour of the selected day in the first city's time zone. For each hour, it uses the Intl.DateTimeFormat API with each city's IANA time zone identifier to compute the local time. The IANA time zone database, maintained by the browser and operating system, contains every historical and current DST rule worldwide, so the tool automatically accounts for spring-forward and fall-back transitions without you needing to know the offset. The colour coding is applied by checking the local hour: hours 9 through 17 (5 PM) are green, hours 8 and 18 through 19 are yellow, and all others are red. The best-window algorithm iterates over all 24 hours and scores each one by counting how many cities fall within the green range, then selects the contiguous window with the highest total score.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does this meeting planner handle daylight saving time?
The planner uses the browser's built-in Intl API, which automatically applies the correct DST rules for every IANA time zone. When you select a date, the tool checks whether each city is observing standard time or daylight saving time on that specific day and adjusts the displayed hours accordingly. This means you never have to manually account for clock changes. If you change the date to one side of a DST transition, you will see the offset shift reflected immediately in the grid.
How many cities can I add to the planner?
You can add up to six cities at once. This covers most real-world meeting scenarios, from small cross-Atlantic teams to large international calls spanning Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Each city gets its own row in the time grid so you can compare all local times at a glance. If you need fewer cities, simply click the remove button next to any city row to take it out of the comparison.
What does the green and red highlighting mean?
Green cells indicate standard working hours, defined as 9 AM to 6 PM local time in that city. Red cells mark unsociable hours, specifically before 8 AM or after 8 PM. Yellow cells show the transitional hours of 8 to 9 AM and 6 to 8 PM, which may be acceptable for some participants but are outside core business hours. This colour coding helps you quickly identify windows where all or most participants are in comfortable working hours without needing to read every individual time.
How does the best window detection work?
The planner scans all 24 hours and counts how many of your selected cities fall within working hours (9 AM to 6 PM) for each hour. It then identifies the hour or consecutive hours where the greatest number of cities overlap in green. If all cities overlap, the window is labelled as ideal. If only some overlap, the tool shows how many cities are in working hours during that window, helping you make an informed decision about whether the trade-off is acceptable.
Can I copy the meeting time to share with participants?
Yes. Click any hour column in the grid to select it, then click the "Copy Meeting Time" button that appears below. The tool generates a formatted summary showing the day, date, and local time for every city you have added. For example: "Monday 14 April at 2:00 PM Europe/London / 9:00 AM America/New_York / 6:00 AM America/Los_Angeles." You can paste this directly into an email, Slack message, or calendar invite so that every participant sees their own local time.
Does this tool work offline?
Yes, once the page has loaded all time zone calculations use the Intl API built into your browser. The IANA time zone database is bundled with your operating system and browser, so no internet connection is needed for the actual computations. However, you will need an internet connection to load the page initially. If you install Daytics as a progressive web app, you can access cached tools even faster on subsequent visits.
