Reading the overlap grid
A time zone meeting scheduler should answer one question quickly: is this hour reasonable for everyone. Meeting Window answers it on a single grid. The 24 columns are the hours of the date you selected, read from UTC, and each row is one participant showing their own local time for the same instant.
The colors do the conversion for you. Green marks local hours between 08:00 and 20:00, a normal working window. Amber covers 06:00 to 08:00 and 20:00 to 22:00 — early or late, but workable. Red is everything else, which in practice means sleeping hours. Along the bottom, the best-overlap band counts how many participants sit inside their green window for each column and marks the columns with the highest count.
That band is a count, not a verdict. It does not read anyone’s existing appointments, and it treats 09:00 and 19:00 the same as long as both fall inside the working window. Click an hour, or drag across a range, to record what each person can attend.
How to schedule a meeting across time zones
Most visitors arrive with a search such as “schedule meeting different time zones” and a conversion table open in another tab. The grid replaces both; the judgment call stays yours.
Begin with columns where every row is green — the hour nobody has to apologize for. When no column is fully green, which happens as soon as three distant regions are involved, compare the amber ones and choose the slot that costs the fewest people a 06:00 start or a 22:00 finish. Check the dates printed under each selection too: far from UTC the same column is already tomorrow for someone, and daylight saving shifts are applied automatically for the date you chose.
Fairness is also cumulative. For a recurring group, take turns moving the slot an hour or two so the same person is not always the one waking early. Set the duration to what the meeting actually needs — a 30-minute window is far easier to place than two hours.
Add to calendar without signing in
Once a window is selected, the card below the grid lists each participant’s local time and date, then offers four exits. Copy simple message lifts the times as plain text for chat or email. Add to Google Calendar opens a prefilled event, Add to Outlook does the same for Microsoft’s calendar, and Download .ics produces a standard file that Apple Calendar, Thunderbird, and desktop clients accept.
Every one of those links is built in your browser from the current selection. Nothing is connected to a calendar account, and nothing lands in your calendar until you confirm the event yourself. Used this way, Meeting Window is a meeting planner across time zones rather than a scheduling service: it decides the hour, your calendar keeps the record.
The meeting note you type travels with those exports, so the agenda sits in the event description. Because the whole state lives in the URL, the same link still shows the participants, date, duration, and selection weeks later when someone asks what was agreed.