Why is scheduling across time zones so difficult?

Time zones create one of the most common coordination challenges in our globalized world. With 24 primary time zones (and many more with half-hour or quarter-hour offsets), finding a meeting time that works for participants in different locations requires mental gymnastics. Add daylight saving time transitions, which occur on different dates in different countries, and the complexity multiplies.

The challenge isn't just calculating the time difference—it's finding hours that fall within acceptable working times for everyone involved. A convenient 10 AM meeting in New York becomes 3 PM in London and 11 PM in Tokyo. Without proper planning tools, teams often end up with meetings that significantly burden some participants while being perfectly convenient for others.

Tool description

This timezone meeting planner helps you visualize time across multiple locations simultaneously. Select any number of timezones and see a complete 24-hour comparison table showing what time it will be in each location for every hour of the day. The tool automatically detects your local timezone and uses color coding to distinguish between AM and PM hours, making it easy to identify suitable meeting windows at a glance.

Features

  • Multi-timezone comparison: Add unlimited timezones to compare times across all locations simultaneously
  • Automatic timezone detection: Your local timezone is pre-selected when you open the tool
  • Date-aware calculations: Select any date to account for daylight saving time differences
  • Visual AM/PM highlighting: Color-coded rows help quickly identify morning vs afternoon/evening hours
  • Comprehensive 24-hour view: See all hours of the day in a scrollable table format

Use cases

  • Remote team standups: Find a daily meeting time that works for distributed team members across continents without forcing anyone into unreasonable hours
  • International client calls: Schedule calls with clients or partners in different countries while respecting normal business hours in all locations
  • Event planning: Coordinate webinars, product launches, or live streams to maximize attendance from your target audience across multiple regions

How it works

The tool takes the first timezone in your list as the reference point. For each hour of the day (00:00 to 23:00) in that reference timezone, it calculates the corresponding local time in all other selected timezones. The calculation accounts for the selected date, which is important because daylight saving time transitions happen on different dates in different countries—meaning time differences can vary by an hour depending on the time of year.

Tips

  • Start with your own timezone as the first entry, then add participant locations—this makes it easier to scan for times that work with your schedule
  • When planning recurring meetings, check the table for dates both before and after daylight saving transitions to ensure the time still works
  • Use the AM/PM color highlighting to quickly spot hours that fall within normal working times (typically 09:00-17:00) for all participants
  • For teams spanning more than 8 time zones apart, consider asynchronous communication or rotating meeting times to share the inconvenience fairly