Research interview time zone planner
Set candidate slots in your own time zone and see every participant's local time on one day-and-night timeline. Early, late, night and weekend times are flagged, clock changes are called out, and each participant gets an invitation written in their local time.
A New York moderator with P01 in London and P02 in Sydney. Edit anything to make it yours; nothing is saved until you do.Your plan is saved in this browser and will be here when you come back.
Session and people
Moderator your time zone sets the timeline
Participants
Hours are each person's comfortable window. Outside someone’s hours, 22:00–06:00 counts as night.
Pick candidate times
- Within their hours
- Early / late daytime
- Night 22:00–06:00
- Weekend
- Candidate slot
Click an hour (left half = :00, right half = :30) or use the fields below. All times start in the moderator's time zone.
Candidate slots 0
Tick Offer for each participant who should see a slot. New slots are offered automatically to everyone for whom they fall within hours on a weekday.
No candidate slots yet. Click an hour on the timeline, then Add candidate slot.
Send the options
Each participant gets only the slots offered to them, written in their own local time. Once they choose, download that slot's .ics (or open it in Google Calendar) from the list above as the final invite.
How it works
Time zones and daylight saving
Every conversion uses your browser's IANA time zone data for the exact date of the slot, so a session three weeks out uses the offset that will apply then. Zones with half-hour and 45-minute offsets, such as Kolkata (UTC+5:30), Kathmandu (UTC+5:45) and Adelaide (UTC+9:30, or +10:30 in summer), are handled the same way.
When a clock change falls within a week of a slot, the slot is marked, and you are told if the gap between you and a participant differs from today's gap. In March and between late October and early November, New York and London are four hours apart rather than five for a week or more.
Calendar files
The .ics files follow RFC 5545 and store start and end in UTC, which every calendar app converts to the viewer's local time. The Google Calendar button opens a pre-filled event in Google Calendar with the same UTC times; nothing is added until you save it there. The description lists the local time for the moderator and each participant. "All slots as holds" marks every candidate as tentative so you can block time in your own calendar while you wait for replies.
What it does not do
It does not book anyone, read calendars or send email. You copy the invitation into your own email or recruiting tool.
Where your plan is kept
Your participants and slots are saved in this browser's local storage as soon as you change something, and come back when you reopen the page. Nothing is uploaded. Use participant codes like P01 rather than full names if you share the computer.
Ambiguous and missing times
On the day clocks go forward, an hour does not exist and cannot be added, and the timeline for that day has 23 hours. On the day they go back, an hour happens twice; the timeline has 25 hours and a typed time uses the first occurrence, with a note.