Global Meeting Time Finder

The Challenge of Distributed Teams

With remote work becoming the norm, teams increasingly span multiple continents and time zones. A meeting scheduled for 9 AM in New York is 10 PM in Tokyo and 2 AM in Sydney. Finding times that work for everyone—without asking someone to join at 3 AM—requires careful planning and visualization tools like this Meeting Finder.

How to Use This Tool

1. Add participant timezones: Enter the cities or timezones where your team members are located. The tool will show their local times.
2. Identify the overlap window: Look for green zones where most participants are within working hours (typically 9 AM - 6 PM local time).
3. Consider "shoulder hours": If perfect overlap doesn't exist, 8 AM or 6 PM may be acceptable compromises for some participants.
4. Rotate meeting times: For recurring meetings, consider rotating the inconvenient time slot so the same people don't always suffer.
5. Export or share: Use the export feature to share the visualization with stakeholders or save for future reference.

Best Practices for Global Meetings

• •Record all meetings: Allow those in difficult timezones to catch up asynchronously. This also helps with documentation.
• •Share agendas in advance: Give participants time to prepare, especially if they're joining at non-optimal hours.
• •Be explicit about timezone: Always include the timezone when sharing times. "3 PM EST" is clearer than "3 PM."
• •Respect cultural differences: Some cultures have different lunch hours or work days (e.g., Friday is the weekend in some Middle Eastern countries).
• •Question meeting necessity: Could this be an async update instead? Reducing meetings reduces timezone friction.

Understanding Time Zones

Time zones are regions that observe the same standard time. Most are offset from UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) in whole hours, though some like India (UTC+5:30) and Nepal (UTC+5:45) use fractional offsets. Daylight Saving Time complicates matters further—not all countries observe it, and those that do change clocks on different dates. This is why tools that account for DST automatically are essential for accurate scheduling.