What Is World Meeting Planner — And Why You Need It
The Essential Guide to International Team Scheduling
Scheduling a call between two people in the same city takes ten seconds. Scheduling one between a designer in Karachi, a product manager in London, an engineer in New York and a client in Sydney can eat half an hour of back-and-forth messages, and it still ends with someone dialing in at midnight. The World Meeting Planner exists to remove that guesswork. It lays every participant's day side by side, so you can see at a glance who is at their desk, who is winding down, and who is asleep.
The core problem is that a time zone difference is not a single number. Business hours in each city cover roughly eight hours of a 24-hour day, and the overlap between several cities is only the slice where all of those windows line up. Between London and New York that slice is a few hours. Add Dubai and it shrinks. Add Tokyo or Sydney and a full business-hours overlap for everyone may not exist at all. A planner that shows the overlap visually tells you within seconds whether you are choosing between good options or between compromises.
Daylight Saving Time makes this harder. Countries change their clocks on different dates, some do not change them at all, and the Southern Hemisphere shifts in the opposite direction from the North. The US and Europe, for example, move their clocks on different weekends, so for a few weeks in March and again in late October the gap between New York and London is an hour different from what your calendar habits expect. India, Pakistan, Japan and most of the Gulf never change. That is why the planner works from real IANA time zone names and a date you choose, instead of a fixed offset table, and why you can test a future date before you send an invite.
Who uses a meeting planner like this? Remote-first companies running weekly all-hands with people on four continents. Agencies coordinating client calls across regions. Open-source maintainers picking a contributor sync. Support teams building follow-the-sun rotations. Families and friends trying to find a call slot that does not fall at 3 AM for anyone. The task is the same each time: find the hour that costs the group the least.
The color system keeps the answer simple. Green cells are normal working hours, amber cells are early-morning or evening hours that most people can manage occasionally, and dark cells are night hours that should be avoided. The Overlap row summarizes each hour across every city you have added, so a fully green column is your best option, a column with no dark cells is an acceptable fallback, and a mixed column tells you that someone will be paying for the meeting with their sleep.
Everything runs in your browser, so the cities and dates you compare are not sent anywhere. When you find a slot you like, one click gives you each person's local time, ready to paste into a chat or an invite, plus a link that reopens the same plan.
How to Use World Meeting Planner — Step by Step
Select Your Date & Primary Location
Pick the meeting date in the "Meeting date" field. Use a future date if you want to check how an upcoming Daylight Saving change affects the overlap. Then choose your primary location. Its 24 hours (00 to 23) become the columns of the grid, and your own time zone is pre-selected automatically.
Add Team Member Cities
Type a city, country or time zone into the "Add a city" box and choose it from the list. You can compare up to eight cities at once. Use a "Quick teams" preset to start from a common setup, and remove any city with the ✕ button on its row.
Analyze the Visual Overlap Grid (Green / Amber / Dark)
Each row is a city and each cell shows that city's local hour. Green is business hours (9 AM – 5 PM), amber is shoulder hours (7 – 9 AM and 5 – 8 PM), and dark slate is night (8 PM – 7 AM). The Overlap row at the bottom scores every column, and the summary above the grid lists the best windows for you to click.
Click Any Hour to Lock & Share Meeting Time
Click a column to highlight that hour across every city. A card shows the exact local time, date and status for each participant. Copy the details for your invite, copy a link that reopens the same plan, or open a prefilled Google Calendar event.