Free Time Zone Meeting Planner: World Time Zone Charts for 11 Business Cities (Winter and Summer) and an International Meeting Planner (PDF, Word, Excel)

What is on the time zone meeting planner

UTC / GMT

Coordinated Universal Time, the reference for world time zones. For scheduling, GMT and UTC are the same.

Offset

Hours ahead of (+) or behind (-) UTC. India is +5:30, so some cities are half an hour off the others.

+1 / -1

The local time falls on the next or previous calendar day compared with UTC.

Shading

Green for 9 am to 5 pm local time, yellow for early morning and evening, grey for night.

In work hours?

Whether the meeting time falls inside the participant's normal working day, so the cost of an awkward slot is visible.

Reading the time zone chart

Find a row where the cities you need are all green, or at least yellow. Read across the row to see each local time, and the UTC time on the left to put in the invitation. For example in the summer chart 14:00 UTC is 10 am in New York, 3 pm in London and 4 pm in Paris and Berlin: a comfortable slot for the Atlantic. Asia and the Americas rarely overlap in working hours; someone will be early or late, and the chart shows exactly who and by how much. Use the winter or summer chart depending on the date, and check the weeks when one country has changed its clocks and another hasn't.

Daylight saving time

The gap between two cities is not fixed. The US and Canada move their clocks on different dates from the UK and Europe, and countries in the southern hemisphere, such as Australia, move theirs the opposite way. Many places, including most of Asia, Brazil and Arizona, do not change at all. That is why there are two charts, and why the weeks in late March, early April, late October and early November need a quick check. Calendar apps handle this automatically if each participant's time zone is set correctly, so always send invitations from a calendar rather than writing the time in an email.

Planning a fair meeting

List each participant, their city and local time on the planner. If anyone falls outside working hours, ask them first; many people are happy to join early once in a while but not every week. For recurring meetings, rotate the time so the same people do not always take the late call, or record the meeting and collect written updates. Keep international meetings shorter, share the agenda in advance, and send notes with actions afterwards using the meeting notes template and action item tracker. Remote teams can set shared core hours in the remote work checklist.

Editing the files

The charts are also in Word and Excel, where you can replace a city with your own office and type its times. The meeting planner PDF is fillable.

Questions

What is the time difference between New York and London?

Usually 5 hours (London is ahead). For a few weeks in March and October/November, when the US and UK change clocks on different dates, it's 4 hours.

Is GMT the same as UTC?

For scheduling, yes. London uses GMT in winter and BST (GMT+1) in summer.

What is a good meeting time for the US, Europe and India?

Late morning in New York (about 14:00 to 15:00 UTC) is afternoon in Europe and evening in India; it's one of the few slots that reaches all three.

Why is India +5:30?

India uses a single time zone set half an hour off the global hourly pattern; some other places, such as parts of Australia and Nepal, also use half or quarter hours.

Which cities do not use daylight saving time?

Of the cities on the chart, São Paulo, Dubai, Mumbai, Singapore and Tokyo keep the same time all year.