Team Availability Heatmap

Every distributed team eventually creates "the spreadsheet" — a shared doc where everyone lists their working hours so the rest of the team can figure out when to schedule calls. It works for a while. Then someone joins from a new timezone, someone else changes their hours, and suddenly the spreadsheet is wrong and nobody remembers who owns it.

A heatmap solves this by doing the math visually. You add your team members, and the grid shows you — at a glance — which hours have the most overlap. Green cells mean most people are in their normal working hours. Red means you're catching someone at dinner or before sunrise. No formulas, no mental arithmetic, just colors.

The difference between this and a simple overlap calculator is scope. The overlap finder tells you the best window for today. The heatmap shows you the entire week, which matters when Monday availability looks different from Friday, or when some team members work half-days on certain days.

Add your team. Type a city name for each person. The tool recognizes over 90 cities and maps them to their correct IANA timezone. If someone's in a less common location, pick the nearest major city in the same timezone.

Adjust working hours if needed. Click any team member to change their default 9-6 schedule. Useful for people who start early, work late, or have non-standard hours. The heatmap recalculates instantly.

Read the grid. Each cell represents one hour of one day. Hover to see the exact breakdown — which team members are working, which are in early/late hours, and which are asleep. The "Best Meeting Slots" section below the grid highlights the top-scoring cells so you don't have to scan the whole thing manually.

Share with your team. Hit the Share button to generate a link that preserves your team configuration. Anyone opening that link sees the same heatmap and can explore it interactively.

Use "Business Hours Only" for cleaner results. If your team only meets on weekdays, this filter removes weekend data and narrows the hour range to 6 AM–10 PM. The result is a tighter, easier-to-read grid.

Look for patterns, not just peaks. Sometimes the single best cell isn't realistic — maybe it's 7 AM for half the team. A slightly lower-scoring slot at 10 AM might get better actual attendance. The heatmap helps you spot these trade-offs because you can see the whole picture.

Revisit after team changes. When someone new joins from a different timezone, re-run the heatmap. What worked for four people might not work for five. Even a one-hour shift can make a big difference when you're spanning 12+ hours of offset.

Once you've identified good time slots, use the meeting planner to set up the actual meeting with calendar exports and shareable links. For recurring schedules, the recurring meetings tool checks consistency across weeks so DST transitions don't catch you off guard.