Find the best meeting time

Questions

FAQ

How does the optimizer rank candidate slots?

Each 15-minute slot in your date range gets two scores: a meeting score (how many participants are inside their working hours, default 9 to 18 local) and a fairness score (how evenly the pain is distributed if anyone is out-of-hours). The composite score subtracts a fairness penalty from the working-hours total, so a slot where everyone is in 9-to-18 ranks above one that hits everyone but with two people at 6am.

Why do you weight sleep hours so heavily?

Asking someone to take a meeting between 22:00 and 07:00 is much more disruptive than asking them to start an hour early or stay an hour late. The optimizer treats those hours as roughly 10x more painful than edge-of-workday hours, which prevents a slot like "3am for one person, 9am for everyone else" from quietly outranking a fairer choice.

Are DST transitions handled correctly?

Yes. Each candidate slot is evaluated using the IANA timezone rules in effect for that specific moment, so a slot picked the week before DST starts in London resolves to a different local time than the same UTC moment two weeks later. There is no fixed UTC-offset shortcut anywhere in the math.

What's in the .ics file I download?

A standard RFC 5545 calendar file with one VEVENT in UTC, plus a description listing each participant's local time at that moment. It opens in Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar, and any other compliant client. The event is single-instance — for recurring meetings, use the Recurring Meeting Drift tool.

How is this different from the Meeting Planner?

The Meeting Planner is a visual timeline you scrub through interactively to see overlaps. This optimizer is the opposite workflow — you specify the constraints and get a ranked list of suggestions. Use Meeting Planner for exploration; use this for "give me three good options for next week."