Time Zone Converter Meeting Planner

How the meeting planner ranks hours

For every one of the 24 hours in the reference city's day, the planner converts that instant into each participant's local time and scores it. A participant inside working hours (09:00–17:00 local, by default) costs nothing. A participant outside working hours costs a penalty that grows with the distance from the working window, and a participant at the weekend costs a much larger flat penalty.

The hours are then sorted by total penalty, and the best five are kept, spaced at least two hours apart so you are not handed six suggestions that are really the same morning. Ties break towards the middle of the day, because 13:00 in London is a far more civilised meeting time than 04:00 in Los Angeles.

• Working hours (09:00–17:00 local): no penalty
• Just outside working hours: small penalty, growing the further out you go
• Middle of the night: the largest penalty
• Weekend: a heavy flat penalty, so weekday slots always win
• Best five results kept, at least two hours apart

Finding the shared working window

The timeline highlights the band where every selected city is inside working hours. When there is no such band — which happens as soon as you span more than about eight time zones — the planner says so explicitly and shows the closest alternatives instead of pretending a perfect slot exists.

That distinction matters. A 22-hour span between San Francisco and Auckland has no overlap that is civil on both ends, and the honest answer is that one side has to accept an early or late meeting. The planner makes that visible so you can decide who absorbs it, rather than discovering the problem when three people do not show up.

Turning a slot into a calendar invite

Once you have picked a slot you can export it in three ways: a Google Calendar link that opens a pre-filled event, an Outlook deeplink, or a downloadable .ics file for anything else. All three are built from the real UTC instants, so the event lands at the correct local time in every participant's calendar regardless of where they are or which time zone their computer is set to.

No account is required and nothing is sent on your behalf. The Google Calendar link simply opens Google's own compose screen with the times already filled in — you review it and press send yourself.

Planning recurring meetings across a daylight saving change

A meeting that works every week can quietly break when one region changes its clocks. If a series is scheduled at 09:00 London and 09:00 New York, the two stay in step only while both sides are on standard time; when the US switches first in March, the London slot stays at 09:00 but the New York slot becomes 08:00.

The fix is to re-check the recurring meeting after each transition. The site shows the next daylight saving change for every selected city, so you can see roughly when the schedule needs a review instead of finding out from a colleague.

Practical habits for distributed teams

Across a small group, the fastest fix is usually to rotate the inconvenient slot rather than to impose it on one person forever. Anchor the meeting to one team's working day and let the others shift, or take turns early and late.

Second, write the time down with its zone — "14:00 CET" rather than "2 pm" — because a message that says "2 pm" is interpreted in the reader's local time and is the single most common cause of a missed call. Third, when the spread is genuinely too wide for live conversation, agree on a written handover or an asynchronous update window instead of a 07:00 meeting that only two people can attend.