Fair Meeting Time Scheduler

Why "find a time that works" isn't enough

Most meeting schedulers ask a single question: is everyone technically available? They treat a 9 am slot for someone in London exactly the same as a 9 am slot for someone in Sydney — even though one is a comfortable start to the work day and the other is past midnight. The result is that certain participants routinely end up taking calls at antisocial hours while others never do. Over months and years, this erodes trust and team cohesion in distributed organisations.

The Fair Meeting Time Scheduler was built to solve a different problem: not just "can everyone make it?" but "is the inconvenience shared fairly?"

How the fairness algorithm works

For each candidate time slot, the algorithm calculates a sacrifice score for every participant. The score is based on how far outside that person's preferred working hours the meeting falls. A slot at 2 pm local time scores near zero — barely any inconvenience. A slot at 7 am scores moderately (early but manageable). A slot at 11 pm scores high, representing a significant personal sacrifice.

The algorithm then evaluates each slot by two criteria: the total sacrifice across all participants (lower is better) and the maximum individual sacrifice (how bad it is for the worst-affected person). The recommended slot is the one that minimises the maximum — in other words, it finds the time where the person who gets the worst deal gets the least-bad deal possible.

Slots are colour-coded so you can see at a glance: green means comfortable for most people, amber means some sacrifice is involved, red means at least one participant will be significantly inconvenienced. You can compare multiple options side by side and make an informed choice rather than defaulting to whoever sent the invite first.

Practical tips for distributed teams

• Rotate the burden. If one slot is the least-bad option overall but still requires someone to join at 8 pm, alternate who takes that slot each week rather than always defaulting to the same person.
• Use the history tab. The meeting history tracks past meetings so you can see whether sacrifice has been distributed evenly over time.
• Keep meetings short. The longer the meeting, the higher the cost of an antisocial time slot. If a 1-hour sync can become a 20-minute async update, the scheduling problem largely disappears.
• Name your participants. Adding participant names rather than just locations makes the output easier to act on when you share it with the team.

Need to convert a specific time rather than schedule a meeting? Use the Time Zone Converter →