# Time Zone Meeting Planner - Find the Best Time Across Zones

> Find a meeting time across time zones: add cities and working hours, see overlaps on a 24-hour timeline, get best-time picks and export .ics or Google Calendar.

- URL: https://qilingtools.com/en/meeting-planner
- Category: Productivity (https://qilingtools.com/en/office)
- Tags: [Date & Time](https://qilingtools.com/en/tags/time), [Everyday Life](https://qilingtools.com/en/tags/life), [Productivity](https://qilingtools.com/en/tags/office)
- Last updated: 2026-10-26
- Price: Free, no sign-up
- Privacy: Runs locally in the browser; files are never uploaded

Scheduling a call with people in London, New York and Shanghai means doing time zone math, and the weeks when daylight saving time changes in one region but not another make it easy to get wrong. This planner lines everyone up on a single 24-hour timeline. Add participants by city or time zone — search works with English and Chinese city names, common abbreviations such as PST or CET, and IANA zone IDs — and set each person’s working hours. Pick a date and every row shows that person’s local working hours, awake off-hours and sleeping hours in different colours, with a bottom row counting how many people are at work in each half hour. Suggested slots are ranked so nobody has to be up late or early, then by how many people are inside their working hours. Click any cell or suggestion to get invite text listing everyone’s local date and time, ready to copy, plus an .ics file with UTC times that Outlook, Apple Calendar and Google Calendar can import, or a one-click Google Calendar link. Your participants, hours, date and duration are stored in the URL, so sharing the link shares the setup. All time zone and DST rules come from the IANA database built into your browser, and everything runs locally.

## How to use

1. Search for each participant’s city or time zone, then add a name and their working hours
2. Choose the date and meeting length, and review the timeline overlaps and suggested times
3. Click a slot to copy the invite, download an .ics file or add it to Google Calendar, or copy the share link

## Features

- Search by English or Chinese city name, abbreviation or IANA zone
- Per-person working hours, including overnight shifts
- 24-hour timeline coloured for work, off-hours and sleep
- Half-hourly count of people in working hours
- Scored best-time suggestions that avoid late nights
- DST-aware, with 23- or 25-hour days on change dates
- Invite text, .ics file (UTC) and Google Calendar link
- Whole setup saved in a shareable URL

## FAQ

### Does it handle daylight saving time correctly?

Yes. Local times are calculated with the IANA time zone database built into your browser (Intl). In the weeks when the US and Europe switch on different dates — mid-March and late October to early November — New York and London are four hours apart instead of five, and the timeline and suggestions update accordingly. On the day the base time zone itself changes, the timeline shows 23 or 25 hours.

### How are the suggested times scored?

Each person gets a score for every half hour: 10 inside working hours, 6 within an hour of their work day, 4 within two hours, 2 for other awake time and 0 for 23:00–7:00 local time. A meeting takes each person’s lowest score across its length and adds them up. Suggestions are ranked first by how many people would be asleep (fewer is better), then by how many are fully within working hours, then by total score, and they never overlap.

### How do I use the .ics file?

An .ics file is the standard calendar format. Start and end times are stored in UTC, so each recipient’s calendar shows the meeting in their own time zone. Open it to import into Outlook or Apple Calendar, or use Import in Google Calendar settings. The description lists every participant’s local time for easy checking.

### Is my data uploaded when I share a link?

No. Cities, names, working hours, date, duration and title are encoded after the “#” in the URL, a part that browsers never send to the server; it’s read only by the browser that opens the link. Leave names blank if you’d rather share just the cities.

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