Team Time Zone Planner

The question a converter cannot answer

A time zone converter tells you that 6:30 PM in Bengaluru is 9:00 AM in New York. That is useful once. What it will not tell you is whether 6:30 PM is a reasonable thing to ask of the person in Bengaluru, whether anyone on the call is being pushed past midnight, or which of the nine possible slots costs the team the least.

This planner works from the team rather than from the clock. You enter who is on the call and when each of them actually works, and it searches the day for slots where those windows overlap. Every candidate is scored, so what you get back is ranked by how comfortable it is for the group, not simply the first gap it found.

That distinction matters most for the awkward pairings. India and the US west coast have no overlap at all inside two conventional nine-to-five days, so somebody has to give. The useful output is not "no overlap found" but "this slot costs one person an early start rather than costing three people their evening".

How the ranking works

The planner divides the selected day into fifteen-minute candidate starts and scores each one against every participant. A slot that falls inside someone's preferred meeting hours scores higher than one merely inside their working hours, which in turn scores higher than a shoulder slot just outside them.

Two things then separate close results. The total score rewards slots where more people are comfortable. The worst individual result breaks ties, so a time that is mediocre for four people is ranked above one that is perfect for three and 11:30 PM for the fourth. Spreading the inconvenience thinly is usually the fairer outcome, and it is almost always the one a team will actually agree to.

• Inside preferred meeting hours scores highest.
• Inside working hours scores next.
• Shoulder hours just outside the working day carry a small penalty.
• Early morning, late evening and night-time carry escalating penalties.
• Anyone marked unavailable, or covered by a date exception, removes the slot entirely.
• A participant marked limited carries a fixed penalty without being excluded.

Working hours, preferred hours and notes

Each person gets two windows. Working hours are when they are contactable at all. Preferred meeting hours are the narrower band they would rather protect for calls, typically excluding the first and last part of the day. Setting both is what lets the planner distinguish a good slot from a merely possible one.

Notes are free text and are not parsed. They exist so that when a slot is flagged as awkward, the reason is visible next to it: a colleague who has written "avoid meetings after 5:30 PM" gets that note surfaced in the results whenever a slot pushes past their preferred window. Anything the planner should actually enforce belongs in the hours or in a date exception, not in a note.

Date exceptions handle the temporary cases a weekly schedule cannot: a public holiday, a day of leave, or an afternoon that is unusually free. They apply to a single date and override the person's normal hours for that day only.

Why the gap between two cities keeps changing

The offset between two places is not a fixed number. India does not observe daylight saving, the UK and most of Europe move their clocks on the last Sundays of March and October, and the US moves on different dates in March and November. For several weeks each year the gap between India and the UK is 4.5 hours rather than 5.5, and the gap between India and New York swings between 9.5 and 10.5.

The planner never stores an offset. Every time shown is derived from the IANA time zone database for the specific date you have selected, which means changing the date to one on the other side of a transition changes the result correctly. If you are scheduling a recurring call that crosses one of those dates, check both sides of it here before you commit.

Saving a team and sharing a plan

A saved team is written to this browser's local storage and stays there until you delete it or clear the site's data. There is no account and nothing is uploaded, which also means a team saved on your laptop will not appear on your phone.

The share link is separate. It carries the cities, working hours, preferred hours, availability, date and duration, so a colleague opening it sees the same setup and the same recommendations. It deliberately does not carry your notes: those are often about a specific person's circumstances and have no business travelling in a URL that might be pasted into a group chat.