Here’s the meeting planning magic trick Google Calendar is missing
Imagine you need to organize a meeting with people in Portland, Tokyo, and Sydney at the same time. Off the top of your head, what’s a time that’d actually work for everyone?
Don’t feel bad if you’re befuddled. Time zones are confusing! You can try to memorize the time difference between different cities, but even that only works some of the time. Daylight Saving changes the time in some places but not others, for one thing—and in the hemisphere opposite yours, it changes it in the opposite direction.
That’s why you shouldn’t try to schedule meetings across time zones off the top of your head. No matter how crafty you may be, there are just too many factors to keep in mind.
But—oh, yes—there is a better way.
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Your new time zone supertool
Agreeing on a time to meet with people in cities around the globe means finding a time where everyone is online—or at the very least awake.
And that’s exactly where Zoneless comes in.
➜ Zoneless is a free website for figuring out overlapping meeting times across multiple time zones.
⌚ There’s no setup whatsoever—just head to the site and start adding cities, and you’ll have your optimal time within a minute or less.
✅ First, open up the site—then:
- Click or tap the search bar to add in whatever cities you want.
- Look at the time highlighted in yellow in each city’s row. That’s the current time—in each of your locations.
- Finally, note the times highlighted in green. Those are the hours between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., for each local time zone (though you can change those “working hours” in the site’s settings, via the gear icon in its upper-right corner, if you want).
???? The idea, then, is to find a time that’s green for everyone—or at the very least not far from it.
So, using my example from before, 4 p.m. in Portland works best. At that time, it’s 9 a.m. in Tokyo and 11 a.m. in Sydney (the following day—make sure you pay attention to the dates in the interface!). And that’s incredibly easy to see in the visual Zoneless gave us.
☝️ All that’s left is to click the time you choose, and a summary will be copied onto your device’s clipboard—including the times and a link back to the service, in case anyone else wants a more visual view. That also gives the people you’re coordinating with a chance to use the tool themselves to propose a different time, if necessary.
This won’t always work flawlessly, of course. Coordinating a meeting that includes Europe, the U.S., and Asia means someone is going to be getting up early or staying up late (I know this one from experience!).
But this tool makes it so much easier to figure that out—and, in many cases, to find a time that is reasonably manageable for everyone, wherever they may be.
- Zoneless is just a website. You can use it in any browser on any device, without any downloads or installations.
- It’s completely free.
- And it doesn’t require any accounts or personal info to be provided—though you can create an account if you want to sync your settings and cities across devices. (The developer says the site doesn’t share your email address or do anything disconcerting with your data even if you do opt to do that.)
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