Use Time Meeting Planner to Quickly organize meetings across time zones
Hey Heroes!
Sometimes we need to send proposed time meetings to people from different time zones. If you work regularly with a specific time zone different from yours, it becomes easier (you can just send the invite with the recipient’s time zone from the start). But what to do when you have more than 2 time zones or cities to agree upon? What you want is to reduce the time in the discussion by proposing a schedule that is fit (or fair) to all attendees.
One option is to use the scheduling assistant (if you are all in the same company or with an open calendar to external parties), another option would be to use FindTime.
I tend to use the Meeting Planner website to check which is the best time across time zones for the people I am inviting.
How do you do it?
First, go into the meeting planner (link below).
Pick a date
Pick the cities where your attendees are (you can add more cities if needed)
Click on “Show Timetable”
You will be directed to a page that has a table with the different cities' time zones compared to UTC, with color coding for Normal Sleeping Hours, General Working Hours, and General Non-working hours. You can change the intervals for every 30, 20, 15, or 10 minutes as well as an hour.
Usually, when the time zones are pretty far apart, someone is going to have to compromise, but as a general rule of thumb don’t select if possible a time slot that has any of the participants with color-coding red.
Once you have selected a time slot, click on it and it will take you to another page with the Details. You can then copy the proposed time slots and send them on a message (or directly a tentative meeting invite) to make sure the attendees agree.
This has been a huge time saver for me and I have no doubt you will also find it useful.
Links: Meeting Planner – Find the best time across Time Zones (timeanddate.com)
I also have a quick video tutorial on my Youtube here.
Happy Scheduling! 😊 Did you find this useful and easy to do?
