Timezones in Telegram Groups: One /tz Command Ends the '3pm Your Time or Mine?' Thread

Scheduling a call across three timezones is a reply-chain nightmare: "3pm your time?" "3pm my time or UTC?" "wait, is that after DST?" Every distributed team has lost a meeting to this conversation.

WhenIsItBot ends it with one command per person, once.

Setup: one command, ever

Each member runs /tz Europe/Warsaw (or CET, PST, +2, -5:30 — IANA names, abbreviations, and numeric offsets all work). That's it. The zone is saved to their account and applies to every group the bot is in.

The payoff: /when

In a group, /when 3pm tomorrow replies with a card showing that time converted for every distinct zone set by members of the chat, plus UTC — up to 12 zones. Nobody converts anything, nobody checks a world-clock site, and daylight saving is resolved live rather than hardcoded (so the card is still right in November and March).

/now works the same way for the current time — useful for "is anyone even awake right now?" checks before you post.

The inline trick most people miss

You don't need the bot in the chat at all. Type @WhenIsItBot 3pm tomorrow in any chat and it posts a one-off multi-zone conversion card. Because a guest has no saved /tz, the card is read as UTC — perfect for posting "the demo is 15:00 UTC" into a channel where the bot isn't installed.

Presets and teams

• /preset add Asia/Tokyo saves zones under your account (3 on free) so your frequent collaborators' zones are always one tap away. On Pro, presets feed the inline mode too.
• /team add core Europe/Warsaw America/New_York (Pro) saves a named, shareable set of zones for the whole group — set it once instead of asking everyone to /tz again.

The honest limits: the card caps at 12 distinct zones in a group, and inline mode uses UTC unless you're Pro with presets.

Try it: @WhenIsItBot. Related: async standups in Telegram for the other half of distributed-team life, and splitting travel expenses for when the team finally meets in person.