Meeting planner across time zones

 
 

The meeting planner shows several places at once as a grid of local times, so the hours sitting inside the working day for everyone are visible at a glance rather than assembled from separate conversions. It is built for the case a two-place converter handles badly: three or more locations, where every candidate slot is uncivilised for at least one of them.

From the UAE the geography is unusually generous. The morning here still reaches east and south-east Asia before their day ends; midday catches Europe as it starts; the late afternoon reaches the east coast of the United States in its morning. Roughly 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm UAE time is the one window holding Europe and North America inside normal hours at once.

The trap is not the clock but the week, and it is specific to this region. The UAE moved to a Monday-to-Friday week in 2022, while Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman kept the Friday-Saturday weekend and work Sunday to Thursday. A Sunday slot is a working day in Riyadh and a weekend in Dubai; a Friday slot is the reverse, with the UAE Friday shortened around midday. For a call spanning the Gulf, Monday to Thursday is the only span that is working time everywhere.

Holidays deserve a second look before an invitation goes out. The Islamic dates fall within a day of each other across the Gulf, so a slot clear here is usually clear next door — but European and North American holidays coincide with none of them.