Meeting time poll

One person creates the poll, picks two to seven candidate dates and an hour range, and shares the link. Everyone else opens it, types a name and paints the times they are free. The grid darkens where more people are available, so the meeting slot usually picks itself. There are no accounts and no invites to accept: the link is the poll.

The grid is stored as real moments in time rather than wall clock hours. The creator picks 09:00 to 18:00 in their own zone, and someone in another country sees those exact moments in theirs, which may land at unusual hours or spill onto a different local day. That is the honest answer, and it is the point: it stops the classic mistake of agreeing on two o'clock without agreeing on whose two o'clock.

Dates can be changed until a second person answers, after which the grid is locked so that nobody's answer silently moves. Votes stay live for about thirty days after the last activity and are then deleted.

Size is the whole game. Three dates from 09:00 to 18:00 in half-hour slots gives eighteen cells a day and fifty-four in total, which someone can paint in about twenty seconds on a phone. The same three dates from midnight to midnight gives a hundred and forty-four, most of them hours nobody was ever going to offer, and the reply rate drops because the grid now looks like work. Propose the hours you would genuinely accept and nothing else.

Hour-long slots suit a poll that crosses several time zones, because half-hour precision stops being useful once one participant is answering at breakfast and another after dinner. Half-hour slots suit a single-office poll where the meeting has to slide between two existing commitments. The choice applies to the whole grid and cannot be mixed.

Seven dates is the hard limit on the form, so the largest grid it can build is seven days of half-hour slots around the clock, three hundred and thirty-six cells. The server accepts up to four hundred, which is why nothing you can set up here will be rejected for size. Two dates is the minimum, because a poll with one date is a question with a yes-or-no answer and does not need a grid.

Cell shading is relative, not absolute. The darkest cells in the grid are the best-attended ones, whatever that number happens to be, so in a poll where two of six people have answered the grid already looks decisive while telling you almost nothing. The key under the grid names the figure the darkest shade stands for, and the Best times panel gives the ratio outright: four of six is not the same claim as four of four, and only the second is highlighted.

Hover or tap any cell and the strip above the grid names who is free at that moment and who is not. The missing names are the useful half. A slot with five of six is usually worth one message to the sixth person, and that is faster than restarting the poll with different dates. The shortlist ranks the top three slots by how many people can make them, and settles a tie in favour of the earlier one, so an unbroken run of equally good slots shows its start rather than its middle.

Nobody has to answer at all for the poll to be informative. The people list shows who has opened it and how many slots each has marked, so a person sitting at zero slots is visibly undecided rather than assumed to be busy.

The link is the only key. Anyone who has it can open the poll, add themselves under any name and mark times, and everyone in the poll can see everyone else's availability. That is deliberate for a team, and a reason not to paste the link into a public channel. There is no owner, no password and no way to remove somebody else: Clear my times only clears your own.

Up to sixty people can join one poll. The name you type is remembered in this browser and reused by ChronoClock's other room tools, so you are not asked for it again; it never leaves your device except as the name shown inside a room you have joined. The poll itself lives on the server rather than in your browser, so closing the tab takes no copy with you, and it is deleted about thirty days after the last thing anybody does in it, with every answer pushing that deadline back.