Seeing overlapping working hours across a remote team, and the apps that show team hours side by side

The quickest way for a remote team to see its overlapping hours is to put every teammate's city on one screen, shade each person's working day, and read off the band where everyone is working at once. A meeting planner or world clock that shows working hours does this in seconds. MeetETA does it free at meeteta.com/overlap with no sign-up, and its world clocks page lets you share the same set of cities with the whole team as a single link.

That shared band is the most important number in a distributed team. It decides which conversations happen live, which happen in writing, and who ends up on the late call. This guide covers how to work it out, what to look for in a tool that shows it, and how the band moves through the year.

Overlap matters more than the time difference

Knowing that Berlin is six hours ahead of New York tells you surprisingly little on its own. What matters is when both people are actually at their desks. With a 9 to 5 day on both sides, Berlin and New York share 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM New York time for most of the year. Two hours a day is workable for a standup and a decision or two, but not for long collaborative sessions, and knowing that number up front shapes how the team should run.

Working out the overlap by hand

The manual method is straightforward. List each city with its UTC offset for the week in question, convert each person's working day into UTC, then take the latest start and the earliest finish. If the start comes before the finish, the time between them is your overlap.

Here is a four city team on Tuesday, November 10, 2026, with everyone working 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM local time.

City	Offset that week	Working day in UTC
San Francisco	UTC-8 (PST)	17:00 to 02:00
New York	UTC-5 (EST)	14:00 to 23:00
London	UTC+0 (GMT)	09:00 to 18:00
Berlin	UTC+1 (CET)	08:00 to 17:00

London, Berlin and New York overlap from 14:00 to 17:00 UTC. That is 9:00 AM to noon in New York, 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM in London and 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM in Berlin. Bring San Francisco in and the overlap vanishes, because the latest start is 17:00 UTC, exactly when Berlin's day ends. Someone has to stretch their day, or that conversation moves to writing.

Doing this once for four cities is fine. Redoing it every time someone joins, moves, or the clocks change is where a tool earns its place.

What an app that shows team hours side by side should do

A good team view lines every city up against the same moment, in rows or columns, so you can scan across and see what time it is for each person. It shades working hours, so the overlap is visible without arithmetic. It applies daylight saving for the date you pick rather than only for today, since a view that is right in November can be wrong in March. It is shareable, so the whole team is looking at the same picture. And it works without accounts, because contractors and occasional collaborators will not sign up just to see when you are online.

Finding and sharing overlap with MeetETA

On meeteta.com/overlap, add each teammate's city and look for the times that fall inside everyone's working hours. Then move to a date in the other season and check again, so you can see how the overlap shifts after a clock change.

For an always visible view, use meeteta.com/clocks. Add the team's cities and click Copy link. The link carries the list of cities, so anyone who opens it sees the same clocks, and it is worth pinning in your team chat. Cities are saved in your browser without an account, and signing in with Google syncs them across your devices.

Each teammate can also publish their own hours. A free personal link at meeteta.com/u/ followed by their handle shows their time zone and working hours on one page, which helps new hires and contractors understand when to expect a reply.

It is worth being clear about scope. MeetETA has no team accounts or shared workspaces. The overlap view and the shared clocks link solve the problem of seeing everyone's hours, but there is no admin panel for managing a team.

How the overlap moves through the year

Clock changes reshape overlap for any team that spans regions with different rules. Take a team split between New York and Bangalore, both working 9 to 6. In winter, 9:00 AM in New York is 7:30 PM in Bangalore, so there is no overlap inside normal hours. In summer, 9:00 AM in New York is 6:30 PM in Bangalore. There is still no shared hour, but the gap is an hour smaller, and an 8:00 AM start in New York reaches Bangalore at 5:30 PM.

For London and New York the overlap is stable most of the year, because both sides change. During the weeks between the US and UK change dates, which in 2027 are March 14 to 27 and October 31 to November 6, New York is only four hours behind London, so the shared window grows by an hour. Teams that rely on a tight late afternoon slot in London should check those weeks in advance.

Running a team with little or no overlap

When the shared band is small, protect it for the work that genuinely needs people together: decisions, unblocking, and the occasional difficult conversation. Everything else, including status updates, handoffs and documentation, works better written down. If an inconvenient slot is unavoidable, rotate it, so the same region is not always taking the 10 PM call. And when you do need to pick one meeting time across several cities, our guide on finding a meeting time across time zones walks through the method.