Free tools
When your team's hours overlap.
Add each person's city and working hours. The planner shows the hours everyone is working at once, in each person's own time, and when no hour suits everyone, the one that suits the most. It uses today's offsets, so summer time is counted.
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Everyone is working 10am–12pm, São Paulo time.
In each person's time:
- São Paulo 10am–12pm
- London 2pm–4pm
- Berlin 3pm–5pm
- New York 9am–11am
How much overlap a team needs
Less than you'd think. Two to four shared hours a day is enough for a standup, the questions that are faster to ask than to type, and a meeting when one is needed. Everything else can happen in writing, in each person's own hours.
What hurts is no overlap at all, or overlap that only exists because someone is working at 7am or 10pm every day. If the planner shows a shared stretch only at the edge of someone's day, that person is paying for the team's meetings.
Finding a fair meeting time
- Meet inside the shared hours. Put the standup and recurring meetings in the stretch the planner shows, and keep the rest of the shared hours free for quick questions. Shared time is the scarcest thing a distributed team has.
- Rotate the bad slot. When the only time that works is early for some and late for others, alternate it week by week, so the same people aren't always the ones logging on at night.
- Fewer, shorter meetings. A 15-minute standup fits into almost any overlap; an hour-long meeting usually doesn't. Ask whether a meeting could be a written update before you look for a time for it.
- Write the outcome down. Whoever couldn't make it should be able to catch up in two minutes: a few lines on what was decided and who's doing what, posted where the team already reads.
- Show your hours. Put your working hours in your calendar and your status, so nobody has to work out whether it's a good time to ask you something.
When there's no overlap
- Written standups. Each person posts what they did, what's next and what's in the way at the start of their day. The others read it at the start of theirs.
- Two smaller meetings. Split the team by region for live meetings, with one person in both, or the notes shared, to carry what matters across.
- Hand over at the end of the day. When one person's evening is another's morning, a short note at the end of the day lets work move on while the first person sleeps.
- One shared hour a week. Even a team with no daily overlap can find one hour a week where everyone stretches a little, and rotate who stretches most.
Summer time moves the overlap
Clocks change on different dates in different places, so a team's shared hours can shift by an hour for a few weeks each spring and autumn. The US changes on the second Sunday in March and the first in November; Europe on the last Sunday in March and October. Australia, New Zealand and Chile change the other way round, in their own spring. India, China, Japan, Brazil and Mexico don't change at all.
The planner works out each city's offset for today, so check it again around those dates if your team's overlap is tight.
How it works it out
It takes the day in half hours of the first person's time, works out what time each half hour is for everyone else using the time zone data in your browser, and counts who's within their working hours. Half hours matter for India, which is five and a half hours ahead of UTC. Hours that run past midnight, like 10pm to 6am, work too, and it all runs in your browser.