The four availability statuses

Every city you track gets a colored dot that answers "can I ping them?" directly:

  • Green — Working. Inside working hours. Safe to call, message, or schedule.
  • Orange — Near start or end. The hour just before work starts and the hour just after it ends. Reachable, but don't open a 90-minute discussion.
  • Gray — Off hours. Evening or early morning. Message them async; expect a reply tomorrow.
  • Red — Sleeping. Roughly 22:00–06:00 their local time. Anything you send now is an alarm clock.

The colors mean you stop interpreting numbers entirely. A row of dots tells you at a glance: London and Berlin are green, New York is orange (just started), Singapore is red. Ask London, wait for New York, don't touch Singapore.

Set working hours that match your team

The statuses are computed from a working-hours range you set yourself in Settings → General. The default is 9:00–17:00, but if your team runs 10:00–18:00 — common in tech — change it and every city's status updates to reflect reality. If you mostly coordinate with one client whose hours you know, set their range instead.

Rename cities after people

You track time zones because of people, not geography. GlobalTimeZones lets you rename any entry — so instead of "Kolkata" and "San Francisco" your list can read "Priya" and "Alex (design)". The status dot next to a name answers the real question — "can I ping Priya?" — with zero translation.

Find who's available right now

When you need someone rather than someone specific — any reviewer, any on-call engineer — the city picker has a "working now" filter that shows only places currently inside working hours. It's the fastest way to answer "who can look at this in the next hour?"

Plan ahead with the time slider

Statuses aren't just for now. Drag the ±24-hour slider to any point in the past or next day and every dot updates: "If I schedule the standup at 8:30 my time, Singapore turns orange and San Francisco turns red — bad idea." The slider moves in 15-minute steps (with a haptic tick on each), so half-hour offsets like India stay exact. Try it in the interactive demo.

A practical setup for a distributed team

  1. Add a city for each person or hub you coordinate with (search by city, country, or common name — "Tanzania" finds Dar es Salaam).
  2. Rename entries after people or teams.
  3. Set working hours to your team's real norm, not the 9–5 default.
  4. Before pinging anyone: glance at the dot, not the time.
  5. Before scheduling anything: drag the slider to the proposed time and check for red dots.

For the scheduling side — overlap windows, DST traps, rotation fairness — see how to schedule meetings across time zones.