How to Use a Meeting Planner to Find Overlapping Times for Remote Meetings

A meeting planner helps you find a time that works across time zones by showing everyone's working hours side by side, so you can pick an overlap instead of converting hours in your head. Use this approach when you're scheduling a remote meeting with people in two or more time zones and want to avoid asking each person to do their own math. The steps below work with any visual time zone tool, including Zoneless, which is described as a free, visual way to schedule remote meetings with no login required.

Step 1: Collect each participant's time zone and working hours

Before comparing anything, write down two things for every person:

• Their time zone — use the city or region name (for example, "London" or "San Francisco") rather than an abbreviation like "EST" or "CET," since abbreviations are ambiguous and don't account for daylight saving.
• Their working hours — the window when they're realistically available, not just "9 to 5." Someone may start at 8:00 or prefer to stop by 16:00.

If you skip this step, you'll end up optimizing for a time that's technically daytime but outside someone's actual availability.

Step 2: Visualize the time zones side by side

A visual meeting planner lays out each time zone as a column or row so you can see the same moment across all locations at once. This is the core advantage over mental math: instead of adding or subtracting hours for each person, you look for a vertical band where everyone's working hours line up.

Zoneless is built around this idea — its tagline is "Find the overlap instantly," and it offers ready-made comparisons such as London vs New York, San Francisco vs Tokyo, Berlin vs Sydney, and London vs Sydney. Those pairings are useful starting points if your team sits in those regions, but the general method is the same for any set of cities.

Step 3: Identify the overlapping window

Look for the region where all the working-hour blocks intersect. In practice you'll usually find one of three situations:

When the overlap is narrow, favor the time that's least disruptive for the most people rather than the one that's most convenient for the organizer.

Step 4: Share the chosen time as a local-time link

Once you've picked the slot, don't send it as "14:00 UTC" or "9:00 my time." Send a link or a converter view so each person sees their own local equivalent. A time zone converter does this by taking one reference time and rendering it in every recipient's zone.

This step prevents the most common failure mode: someone reads the time in the wrong zone and shows up an hour off. It also means you don't have to re-explain the time when someone forwards the invite.

Step 5: Double-check daylight saving and edge cases

Daylight saving transitions are where otherwise good overlaps break. Two things to verify:

• Whether any participant's region is currently observing daylight saving. A city that shifts its clocks can move an overlap by an hour, sometimes eliminating it entirely.
• Whether the meeting date falls near a transition. If your meeting is within a week or two of a DST change in any participant's region, re-check the overlap for the actual date rather than assuming today's offset holds.

Other edge cases worth a quick look: regions with half-hour or 45-minute offsets (such as India or parts of Australia), and participants who work flexible hours and may be available outside a standard 9-to-5.

A quick example

Suppose you're scheduling between London and Sydney. You open a visual planner, see the two columns, and look for where working hours overlap. Because the two cities are far apart, the shared window will be small and will fall at an awkward hour for one side. Your options are to accept that edge time, rotate the meeting so the inconvenience alternates, or move the discussion to written updates. The planner doesn't make that decision for you — it just shows you the real options so you can choose deliberately.

What to check before you commit

• Every participant's time zone is named by city or region, not abbreviation.
• The overlap sits inside the working hours of the people who matter most for that meeting.
• The chosen time is shared as a local-time link, not a single reference zone.
• Daylight saving has been checked for the actual meeting date.
• Anyone at the edge of the overlap has confirmed they can attend.