Add each location and its working hours. The grid shows who is at work in every hour of the day, where the team overlaps for handoffs and which hours nobody covers.
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing you enter here is sent to a server.
A team spread over several time zones has an advantage most teams would pay for: somebody is awake during normal working hours for much of the day. Used well, that becomes a follow-the-sun rotation in which nobody is paged at 3 a.m. Used badly, it produces handoffs that happen by chat message with no chance to ask a question.
Two numbers decide which you get. The overlap — hours when adjacent locations are both at work — is when handoffs, reviews and incident debriefs can happen face to face. The gap — hours when nobody is at work — is the part of the day that still needs a pager.
Between each pair of neighbouring locations, at least one shared working hour makes a live handoff possible.
Offices about eight hours apart — for example Europe, the US West Coast and East Asia — can cover 24 hours with daytime shifts only.
If nobody is at work for a few hours, decide who carries the pager then, and rotate that duty so it is not always the same office.
Offsets shift twice a year and not on the same dates everywhere. The grid uses today's offsets; check it again in March and October.
Each row is a location, each column an hour of the day in UTC (or your local time, if you tick the box). Green cells are that location's working hours. The bottom row counts how many locations are at work: a dark green cell means everyone, a red cell means no one. Working hours that cross midnight — a night shift from 22:00 to 06:00 — are handled as you would expect.
Convert each location's working hours to one reference time, usually UTC, and look for hours that fall inside all of them. The grid does this conversion and highlights the shared hours.
A schedule in which responsibility moves between offices in different time zones during the day, so each team is on call only in its own working hours.
That is normal for teams spanning more than about ten hours. Plan handoffs between neighbouring pairs of locations instead, and write the handoff notes down.
It uses each zone's current UTC offset from your browser's time zone database, so it is right for today. Offsets change when clocks change, so re-check around those dates.
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