How to Find a Meeting Time Across Time Zones

The overlap method, in four steps

Scheduling across zones fails when each person does mental math in their own head. Put every city on one timeline instead and let the picture decide:

1. Open the world clock and pin each participant's city with the finder — type a city name, a zone code like JST, or an offset like +5:30.
2. Drag the day planner scrubber across the primary day to preview every city at that hour.
3. Look for the hour where every row shows local business hours highlighted at the same time — the workday overlap.
4. Copy the times or the share link and paste the result into the invite so everyone reads the same clocks.

Reading the planner output

Each row shows what that city sees at the scrubbed hour: local time, a daytime or night flag, and whether the hour falls inside the 9:00 to 18:00 business window used for the highlight. Rows also carry the offset from your time and a DST badge while that zone observes summer time. The full overlap — an hour where all pins sit inside their workdays — is rare when the spread is more than about nine hours, so expect to compromise toward the edge of somebody's day.

Watch out for daylight saving

Two meetings planned a month apart can sit in different overlap spots, because the southern and northern hemispheres shift opposite ways and some regions do not shift at all. The planner derives every city from live IANA zone data in your browser, so transition days sort themselves out — but re-check the planner before confirming a date near a changeover weekend rather than trusting a screenshot from weeks ago.

Half hour and quarter hour offsets

Not every zone runs on a whole hour: India stays at UTC+5:30, Nepal at UTC+5:45, and parts of Australia such as Adelaide run at half hour offsets. Mental arithmetic across those edges goes wrong constantly. Pin the cities and let the planner compute; the finder accepts zone codes and offsets, so you never need the math.

Agree on one clock for the invite

Once the hour is chosen, write the invite the way calendars expect: the calendar tool stores the absolute moment, so pick the time slot in the organizer's zone and let every attendee's calendar convert it. Spell out what attendees see — adding a line like 15:00 UTC keeps short-notice changes unambiguous. The planner's Copy times output gives you those lines without re-deriving them.

Share the whole setup with one link

Click Copy link on the world clock (or press L) and every pinned city plus the primary zone is encoded into the address. Paste it into the invite or the team chat, and anyone clicking it sees the same cities on their own device — no account on either side. Save a link per recurring group; updating pins regenerates the same link shape for the next round.

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