## Introduction
With the rapid rise of remote work, organizations face the challenge of coordinating teams spread across multiple time zones. Understanding when remote workers’ schedules overlap can drastically improve communication, meeting scheduling, and collaboration efficiency. Operations teams and automation engineers benefit from automating the detection of these timezone overlaps, allowing them to identify optimal windows for synchronous work without tedious manual calculations.
This guide provides a step-by-step tutorial on building an automation workflow in n8n to track timezone overlaps among remote workers. Using simple data inputs and leveraging n8n’s workflow automation capabilities, you will create a system that fetches team member availability, calculates overlaps, and outputs actionable insights.
—
## Problem Statement
**Problem:** Remote teams often struggle to find meeting times that work for all participants due to varied timezones.
**Benefit:** Automating timezone overlap detection saves time, reduces scheduling conflicts, and improves meeting attendance.
**Users:** Operations specialists, team managers, and automation engineers responsible for workforce coordination.
—
## Tools and Services Used
– **n8n:** Open-source workflow automation tool to build the automation.
– **Google Sheets:** Serves as a data source to store remote workers’ timezone and availability information.
– Optional services for output:
– **Slack** (to post timezone overlap summaries)
– **Email (SMTP)** (to send reports)
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## Workflow Overview
1. **Trigger:** Scheduled (e.g., daily at 8 AM) to analyze current timezone overlaps.
2. **Read Data:** Fetch remote workers’ timezone and working hours from Google Sheets.
3. **Process:** Convert working hours into UTC, calculate overlapping time windows between team members.
4. **Output:** Generate a summary report and deliver via Slack or Email to operations.
—
## Step-by-Step Tutorial
### Step 1: Prepare Your Google Sheet
Create a Google Sheet with the following columns:
| Name | Timezone | Work Start (HH:mm) | Work End (HH:mm) |
|————|——————|——————–|——————|
| Alice | America/New_York | 09:00 | 17:00 |
| Bob | Europe/London | 08:00 | 16:00 |
| Charlie | Asia/Tokyo | 10:00 | 19:00 |
– Timezones should be in IANA format.
– Working hours are local times for each user.
### Step 2: Set Up Google Sheets Node in n8n
– Add a **Google Sheets** node in n8n.
– Authenticate with your Google account.
– Configure it to **Read rows** from your remote workers sheet.
### Step 3: Schedule Trigger
– Add a **Cron** node as trigger, e.g., configured to run daily at 8:00 AM UTC to prepare the report.
### Step 4: Process Timezone and Working Hours
– Add a **Function** node to process the rows from Google Sheets.
– The function will:
1. Parse each worker’s timezone and working hours.
2. Convert local work start and end times into UTC timestamps for the current day.
3. Store these UTC intervals per user.
Example JavaScript code inside Function node:
“`js
const dayjs = require(‘dayjs’);
const utc = require(‘dayjs/plugin/utc’);
const timezone = require(‘dayjs/plugin/timezone’);
dayjs.extend(utc);
dayjs.extend(timezone);
const dateToday = dayjs().format(‘YYYY-MM-DD’);
const workers = items.map(item => {
const { Name, Timezone, “Work Start (HH:mm)”: start, “Work End (HH:mm)”: end } = item.json;
const workStartUTC = dayjs.tz(`${dateToday}T${start}`, Timezone).utc();
const workEndUTC = dayjs.tz(`${dateToday}T${end}`, Timezone).utc();
return { Name, workStartUTC, workEndUTC };
});
return workers.map(w => ({ json: {
Name: w.Name,
workStartUTC: w.workStartUTC.toISOString(),
workEndUTC: w.workEndUTC.toISOString()
}}));
“`
### Step 5: Calculate Overlapping Intervals
– Add another **Function** node to calculate timezone overlaps.
– This node will:
1. Take the list of worker UTC intervals.
2. Compute the maximum start time and minimum end time across all workers to find the intersection interval.
3. If there is no valid overlap (start >= end), report no overlap.
Example code:
“`js
const workers = items.map(item => ({
Name: item.json.Name,
start: new Date(item.json.workStartUTC),
end: new Date(item.json.workEndUTC)
}));
// Compute max start
const maxStart = new Date(Math.max(…workers.map(w => w.start.getTime())));
// Compute min end
const minEnd = new Date(Math.min(…workers.map(w => w.end.getTime())));
if (maxStart >= minEnd) {
return [{ json: { overlapExists: false, message: ‘No timezone overlap found among remote workers today.’ } }];
} else {
return [{ json: {
overlapExists: true,
overlapStartUTC: maxStart.toISOString(),
overlapEndUTC: minEnd.toISOString(),
message: `Overlap window from ${maxStart.toISOString()} to ${minEnd.toISOString()} UTC.`
} }];
}
“`
### Step 6: Format Output for Notification
– Add a **Set** node to format the message nicely.
– You might want to convert overlap UTC to a more readable timezone if desired, or add the info per user.
Example:
“`text
Today’s overlapping working hours among remote workers are from 13:00 UTC to 15:30 UTC.
This is the suggested window for synchronous meetings.
“`
### Step 7: Deliver the Report
– Add an output node:
– **Slack Node:** Configure to send the message to a specific Slack channel.
– or **SMTP Node:** To send an email report to the operations team.
—
## Common Errors and Tips
– **Timezone name errors:** Ensure all timezones are valid IANA identifiers (e.g., ‘America/New_York’). Invalid names cause conversion errors.
– **Daylight Saving Time (DST):** Using dayjs-timezone ensures DST is handled automatically.
– **Date calculation:** Always handle working hours on the same date to avoid cross-day overlap complexity.
– **Edge cases:** Workers with no defined working hours should be filtered out to avoid false no-overlaps.
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## How to Adapt or Scale This Workflow
– **Add availability days:** Integrate weekday filtering to respect weekends or off days.
– **Handle multiple overlapping groups:** Group only subsets of workers who need to coordinate.
– **Visualize overlaps:** Export data to Google Sheets or BI tools for heatmaps.
– **Integrate calendar APIs:** Automate fetching real-time availability from Google Calendar or Outlook.
– **Multi-day overlaps:** Extend logic to handle availability across multiple days or time spans.
—
## Summary
In this tutorial, we automated the detection of timezone overlaps for remote workers using n8n. From pulling timezone and availability data from Google Sheets to computing overlaps and delivering notifications via Slack or email, this workflow empowers operations teams to streamline scheduling across distributed teams.
### Bonus Tip
Combine this workflow with a calendar integration to dynamically adjust meeting suggestions based on actual scheduled events, improving the relevance and effectiveness of the timezone overlap insights.
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By building and customizing this workflow, your operations team can significantly reduce the friction in coordinating a global remote workforce.