Tools · Follow-the-sun planner

Does your follow-the-sun chain actually cover the sun?

Put each office and its local hours on one clock. The planner shows the world at any minute of the UTC day, who is on watch and who is asleep, every seam in order with who is left and for how long, and what happens to all of it when the clocks change.

It is a projection of the hours you configure, not of shifts anyone worked. Whether someone was actually on watch at 03:00 on a Tuesday is measured from the rota as it ran — that part is what SOC Rotate does →

Start from
  1. to
    Local · 9 h on watch
  2. to
    Local · 9 h on watch
  3. to
    Local · 12 h on watch
The world at 06:00 UTCon watch: Singapore
Singapore · 14:00London · 07:00New York · 02:00← laterearlier →06:00 UTC
06:00UTCDrag the sun: left is later, right is earlier
How to read the map
  • The one that moves is the sun. It sits where the sun is directly overhead, local noon, and slides west as you move the clock. It is not about any office.
  • The small one under each office stays put. Filled means it is daylight there right now; hollow means it is dark. The moment it flips is that office’s sunrise or sunset. The exact times are in the table below.
  • The shaded half is night, edged by the dashed line. When the line crosses an office, its small sun flips.
  • A lit office dot is on watch at the time on the clock, with its own colour and its local time on the label. Grey means off shift, whatever the sky is doing.
OfficeNowSunriseSunsetOn watch
Singapore14:00 · daylight06:54 local · 22:54 UTC18:52 local · 10:52 UTC08:00–17:00 local · on now
London07:00 · dark07:22 local · 06:22 UTC18:16 local · 17:16 UTC09:00–18:00 local
New York02:00 · dark07:06 local · 11:06 UTC18:22 local · 22:22 UTC09:00–21:00 local
The seams, in order24 h covered · 6 h handover
  1. 00:00Singapore opens — Singapore and New York together1 h
  2. 01:00New York closes — Singapore alone7 h
  3. 08:00London opens — Singapore and London together1 h
  4. 09:00Singapore closes — London alone4 h
  5. 13:00New York opens — London and New York together4 h
  6. 17:00London closes — New York alone7 h
Every moment the chain changes, in UTC, with who is left and for how long. A red row is the hole; a blue duration is a handover. Read top to bottom it is the runbook.
Clock changes in the next eight monthsfrom 7 Oct 2026
  1. 25 Oct
    London +01:00 → UTC
    no change
  2. 1 Nov
    New York -04:00 → -05:00
    no change
  3. 15 Mar
    New York -05:00 → -04:00
    no change
  4. 28 Mar
    London UTC → +01:00
    no change
Each line re-runs the day with the offsets in force after that change. A chain that closes in summer can open an hour in autumn when one office falls back a week before the next — the seam between them moves, and the hours on either side do not.
Reading it

Why the day is drawn in UTC

A chain spans time zones, so there is no shared midnight to reason in. The product measures a client’s coverage the same way, and for the same reason.

  1. 01
    The map lies; the clock does not
    Dublin and Austin look adjacent on a map of the chain. Dublin closes at 19:00 local, 18:00 UTC. Austin opened at 08:00 local, 13:00 UTC, and closes at 20:00, 01:00 UTC. The five hours after that belong to nobody, and nothing about either office’s rota looks wrong.
  2. 02
    Overlap is a handover, up to a point
    An hour where two offices are both on watch is where the outgoing shift briefs the incoming one. Five hours of it is a rota paying twice for the same coverage. The planner counts it; whether it is the right amount is your call.
  3. 03
    Clock changes move the seam
    Europe changes its clocks on the last Sunday of March and October; North America on the second Sunday of March and the first of November. For two or three weeks a year the offset between London and New York is four hours, not five. A chain whose seam was exact now has a hole, or an overlap, of exactly one hour — and it will close again on its own, which is why nobody fixes it.
Next

The configured day is the easy part

This shows what the offices are meant to cover. SOC Rotate measures what they did cover, from the rota as it ran, and reports it per client against the hours they are owed.

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  • ChainsOffices in handover order per client, with the day previewed as you build it.
  • MeasuredCoverage swept in absolute time across every office’s rota, including the DST hole.
  • ReportedA coverage report per client, from the rota as it actually ran.