About Timepool

The problem

Six people, one dinner, eleven messages, and somehow still no date. Group scheduling is a genuinely hard coordination problem wearing the costume of a trivial one, and most tools make it worse — by demanding accounts before anyone can answer, by collecting email addresses so they can nag people later, or by treating "3pm" as a string rather than a moment in time.

The approach

Timepool does the smallest thing that actually works. The organizer proposes a range rather than guessing at specific slots. Everyone else gets one link, types a name, and drags across a grid. The answers pool together into a heatmap, and the windows that work for the most people rise to the top.

No accounts, so nothing to sign up for and nothing to leak. No email addresses, so nothing to spam. Polls delete themselves after they stop being relevant, because a scheduling tool has no business remembering what you did last spring.

The details we cared about

• Time zones done properly. Slots are stored as absolute instants and rendered in each visitor's own zone, daylight saving included. A distributed team can use this without anyone doing mental arithmetic.
• Links that can't be walked. Poll addresses are derived through a salted permutation rather than counting upward, so there's no sequence for a curious stranger to follow.
• Results that read like sentences. Neighbouring slots with identical availability are merged, so you get "Thursday 2:00–4:00 PM, all six of you" instead of four rows saying the same thing.
• A maybe that means maybe. "If needed" counts for half, which is about right for an hour someone could do but would rather not.

How it stays free

Advertising on the site's public pages, and nothing else. Poll content is never shared with advertisers and never used to target anything — see the privacy page for exactly what is and isn't stored.