Overlap — The hour that works for everyone.
Stop doing time zone math.
Overlap lays several people's days on one line so you can see — not calculate — the hours a meeting can actually happen, and who pays for it when none of them are good.
What it does
Add people by city, by time zone or by a plain offset. Each one becomes a horizontal band of their own local day: grey while they are asleep, amber while they are awake but off the clock, green inside their working hours. The columns where the bands agree are your meeting.
Working hours belong to the person, not to the board. A developer who starts at 11:00 and a client who stops at 16:00 both keep their real day, and the answer changes accordingly.
Underneath, one-hour windows are ranked: how many people are at work, how many are merely awake, and — when nobody can have it easy — exactly who has to bend. Any window exports to a calendar file, and the whole board is a link you can send.
Why the usual methods fail
Mental math is fine for two cities you know. It falls apart at four you do not, and it breaks completely in the two weeks each spring and autumn when one country has changed its clocks and the other has not.
A world clock tells you what time it is somewhere. It does not tell you whether that person is asleep, at dinner, or three hours into their working day — which is the only thing you actually needed to know.
A scheduling poll pushes the conversion onto everyone else and then blocks the booking until the slowest person replies. That is the work you were trying to avoid, redistributed.
And the polite version of the problem is invisible: 08:00 in Berlin is an ordinary hour for a Berliner and a cruel one for someone in Los Angeles. Nobody notices until the invitation has already landed.
How it works
01
Offsets come from the browser, not from a table
Every conversion goes through the standard Intl API and the browser's own IANA time zone database. There is no offset list of ours to go stale: if the browser knows a country changed its rules, so does the board.
02
Daylight saving is resolved per person and per date
Pick a date in late March or late October and the board itself changes length — 46 half-hour columns on a day that loses an hour, 50 on a day that repeats one — because each row is computed from the real instant rather than a fixed offset.
03
Columns are half an hour wide
Zones at :30 and :45 — India, Nepal, the Chatham Islands — line up honestly instead of being rounded to the nearest hour, which is the rounding that produces meetings nobody can attend.
04
Windows are scored, not guessed
Being at work counts fully, being awake near working hours counts partly, being asleep disqualifies a window outright. Candidates are kept at least two hours apart so the suggestions are genuinely different options, and each person is flagged early, late or off-hours.
05
The link is the document
People, names, working hours, date and anchor are all encoded in the URL. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account: sharing a board is sharing a link, and the person who opens it sees exactly what you saw.
When to use it
A standup across three continents
Find out whether an hour inside everyone's working day exists at all — and when it does not, which person is paying for it, so the cost can be rotated instead of silently assigned to whoever complains least.
Interviewing candidates abroad
The hour you propose is read as a signal about the company. Set the candidate's city, look at the green columns, and avoid asking someone to perform at 22:00 on a work night.
Client and agency calls
You rarely know a new client's real working day. Set it once, send them the board, and let them counter-propose from the same picture instead of trading "does 3pm your time work?" for two days.
Working two markets at once
One contract in Berlin, another in Singapore. Put both on the board with your own row in the middle and see, before you promise anything, how many hours of genuine overlap your day really contains.
Calling family in another country
Here the grey band is the useful one: it tells you when a call would wake someone up, and the amber band tells you when they are awake but would rather be eating dinner.
Questions people ask
- Do I need an account?
- No. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to install. Open the page, add people, send the link.
- Where does my data go?
- Nowhere. The people you add are encoded in the URL in your address bar and every calculation happens in your browser. Saved teams use your browser's own storage and stay on that device.
- Does it handle daylight saving time?
- Yes, per person and per date. On a transition day the board is literally a different length, because each row is derived from the real instant rather than from a stored offset.
- My city is not in the list.
- Type the IANA zone instead — Europe/Berlin, Asia/Kolkata, America/Sao_Paulo — or a plain offset like UTC+3 or +05:45. Both always work, including for places the city index does not cover.
- How many people fit on one board?
- Up to twelve. Beyond that the bands stop being readable, and in practice a meeting spanning more than twelve time zones needs a recording rather than a slot.
- Can each person have different working hours?
- Yes, including windows that cross midnight for night shifts. They travel in the link with everything else.
- What if there is no hour when everyone is awake?
- It says so plainly instead of inventing a green column, then offers the least-bad hour and names who would be asleep for it. A fair-rotation view helps spread that cost across a team over several weeks.
- Does it work on a phone?
- Yes. The board scrolls inside its own frame, the rows stay readable at small widths, and light and dark follow your system setting.
Open Overlap
Add two people and the city you keep getting wrong. Fifteen seconds is enough to see whether a good hour exists.
Find a meeting timeoverlap.autofract.com