Find the best time for a meeting across time zones
Add everyone's city and scan the whole day at once — every hour scored for who is at work, who is stretching, and who is asleep, with the three fairest slots ranked.
Meeting overlap finder
Offsets are resolved for this date — a slot that works in June can fail in January.
Start typing a city and pick from the list, or press Enter. Cities you added on the homepage comparer are already here.
- working hours, 09–17
- early or late, 07–09 and 17–21
- overnight
One row per city, one column per hour of your day — each cell shows that city's own clock, marked for whether anyone there would be working.
The three fairest one-hour slots appear here, ranked — nobody-asleep first, then most people at their desks.
How to read the grid
Each row is a city; each column is one hour of the chosen date on your clock. The figure inside a cell is that city's own wall time at that hour — so the row for Tokyo read against a London day runs eight or nine hours ahead depending on the season, and a row for Kolkata shows the half-hour that its UTC+5:30 offset really produces. Solid cells are ordinary working hours, striped cells are the early-or-late fringe, plain cells are overnight; a small +1 or −1 marks the cells where that city's calendar has already turned, which is what stops "Thursday at 5" meaning Friday to half the room. To check one specific proposed time rather than scan the whole day, the homepage comparer does exactly that with the same city list.
Why the best slot moves with the calendar
Timezone gaps are not constants. Regions that observe daylight saving shift on different dates — the London–New York gap is five hours most of the year but four for a few weeks each spring and autumn — and the southern hemisphere shifts in the opposite direction, so London–Sydney swings between eight and eleven hours across the year. A recurring meeting pinned to "the slot that worked in June" can quietly land someone at 6 a.m. by November. That is why this page asks for a date and resolves every hour against that date's actual offsets, rather than assuming today's.
When no slot is fair, rotate it
Once a group spans more than about fourteen hours — the US west coast, Europe, and east Asia together, say — there is no hour where everyone is even on the fringe, and the ranking will show every candidate costing someone their night. Pretending otherwise just picks a permanent victim. The workable pattern for a standing meeting is rotation: take the top-ranked slots, which each burden a different city, and cycle through them week by week so the 6 a.m. call visits everyone in turn instead of living in one person's calendar. The alternative is splitting into two sessions, each scheduled for the subset it can actually serve.
The link is the state
As you add cities and change the date, the page writes both into its own address — open the grid you want, press Copy link, and paste it into the invite thread. Whoever follows it sees the same cities, the same date, and the same ranking, computed fresh in their own browser; nothing is stored on a server, so the link works for anyone, indefinitely. It also makes disagreements cheap to settle: instead of arguing about whether 9 a.m. is fair to Singapore, send the grid and let the plain cells argue for you.
Common questions
How is the best slot decided?
By tiers, not averages. A slot where nobody is asleep always beats a slot where anyone is, no matter how comfortable it is for the rest — with a group of four, one overnight city costs five points while a working city earns one, so no amount of convenience elsewhere can buy back someone's 3 a.m. Within a tier, the slot with more people inside ordinary working hours wins, and ties go to the earlier hour.
Does it use the daylight saving rules for the date I pick?
Yes — every hour is resolved to a real instant on that date using your browser's own timezone database, so the offsets are the ones that will actually apply. This matters more than it sounds: London and New York are five hours apart most of the year but four for a few weeks each spring and autumn, and a southern-hemisphere city like Sydney moves the other way entirely. The best slot in June is routinely not the best slot in January.
What do the three cell patterns mean?
A solid filled cell is 09:00 to 17:00 local — an ordinary working hour. A striped cell is the fringe, 07:00 to 09:00 or 17:00 to 21:00: possible, but you are asking a favour. A plain cell means that city is overnight. The fill, the stripes, and the bold figures are three separate signals, and each cell also states its status in text for screen readers, so nothing depends on distinguishing colours.
Why does a cell show +1 or −1?
The calendar date in that city differs from yours at that hour. Schedule 17:00 Thursday in London and Tokyo is already 01:00 on Friday; schedule 06:00 and Los Angeles is still on Wednesday evening. The marker is what stops "Thursday at 5" from meaning two different days to two different attendees.
Can I share what I've set up?
Yes — the cities and the date are written into the page address as you work, so the URL in your bar is always the current state. Press Copy link and paste it into the invite thread; whoever opens it sees exactly your grid and ranking. Nothing is uploaded anywhere: the link is the state, and the scoring runs in the reader's own browser.
What if every hour has someone asleep?
Then no fair hour exists and the tool will say so rather than pretend. That happens once the group spans more than about fourteen hours — San Francisco, London, and Sydney together leave no hour where all three are even on the fringe. The honest fixes are to rotate the meeting time through the top-ranked slots so the overnight burden moves each week, or to split into two sessions that each cover a workable subset.