If you work on an asynchronous, globally distributed engineering team, you know this exact feeling:
You're 25 minutes into a Google Meet call with teammates in Tokyo, London, New York, and Mumbai. Discussion runs long, and someone suggests:
"Let's push this architecture review by another 45 minutes, or maybe reschedule for tomorrow morning."
Immediately, everyone freezes and starts doing mental gymnastics:
- Wait, what time is it for Alex right now?
- Is 8:00 AM my time 11:30 PM for Priya?
- Are we asking Yuki to review a pull request at 2:00 in the morning?
Timezones are painful enough on calendars, but during live video calls, calculating them on the fly breaks conversational flow.
To solve this, I built Meet Clocks — a lightweight, open-source Chrome extension that brings ambient timezone awareness and meeting planning directly into Google Meet.
⚡ What it Does
1. 🕒 Stationary Video Tile Badges
Instead of opening world clock tabs or checking widgets on your phone, frosted-glass clock pills pin neatly to each participant's video tile in Google Meet.
- Displays local time, timezone offset (
+3h,−13h), and day shifts (yesterday/tomorrow). - Badges automatically detect free space in tile corners and fade smoothly on hover so they never cover Google Meet's native microphone/camera buttons or attendee names.
2. ☀️ Daylight & Sleep Status Dots
A glanceable visual indicator next to each person's badge:
- ☀️ Working Hours (09:00 – 18:00): Green dot.
- 🌙 Off-Hours (18:00 – 22:30 / 06:30 – 09:00): Amber dot.
- 💤 Night / Sleep (22:30 – 06:30): Red sleep warning so you never schedule late-night calls by accident.
3. ✨ 30-Minute Overlap Scrubber (Golden Hours Finder)
When planning a follow-up call, click Plan in the meeting dock to reveal a 24-hour overlap ribbon with 30-minute intervals:
As you drag the slider:
- All participants' clocks scrub synchronously in 30-minute intervals.
- The planner automatically flags
✨ Golden Hourwhen all participants are in their waking/working window, or displays warnings like⚠️ Yuki Asleepwhen someone is offline.
You can also test this right now without installing anything via the Interactive 4-Person Web Playground.
4. 💬 1-Click Chat Proposal
Click Share to format and paste a clean summary into Google Meet's in-call chat:
Meeting Timezones:
• Alex: 09:00 AM (New York) ☀️
• Sarah: 10:00 PM (Tokyo) 🌙
• Dev: 06:30 PM (Mumbai) ☀️
— via Meet Clocks
🛠️ Under the Hood: Engineering & Privacy
When building browser extensions for workplace communication tools, privacy and performance must come first.
🔒 1. Zero-Trust Permission Architecture
Most meeting extensions ask for extensive permissions like <all_urls>, web request interceptors, or browser history access.
Meet Clocks is engineered with minimal footprint:
-
Only 1 Permission Requested:
"storage"— strictly used to save your local 12h/24h format preference inchrome.storage.local. -
Scoped Content Script: Only runs on
https://meet.google.com/*. It cannot read bookmarks, browsing history, or other open tabs. - Zero Media Access: No access to camera, microphone, or meeting speech transcripts.
🌐 2. Ephemeral In-Call Presence
For teammates who both have the extension installed, times sync ephemerally through a lightweight, open-source Cloudflare Worker relay.
- No user accounts, passwords, or persistent profiles.
- Room tokens are hashed with SHA-256.
- All presence data self-destructs 30 minutes after your meeting ends.
- If you don't want to sync, you can add names and timezones manually offline.
🧩 3. Collision-Free DOM Observation
Google Meet's video layout is highly dynamic — tiles resize, reorder, and split into pagination grids as participants join or share screens.
Rather than thrashing the DOM with frequent re-renders, Meet Clocks uses a throttled MutationObserver combined with bounding-rect collision checks to anchor badges firmly in available negative space without jitter.
🚀 Try It Out (100% Free & Open Source)
- 📦 Chrome Web Store: Install Meet Clocks (Free)
- 🎮 Live Interactive Web Playground: Try the 4-Person Scrubber in your browser
- 💻 GitHub Repository: mamarezza/meet-clocks (MIT Licensed)
If you find it helpful for your distributed team, PRs, feedback, and GitHub stars ⭐ are very welcome!
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