The short answer: to track a place, search for the city by name. Atlas pins it to your map and shows its current local time right away. You never type a UTC offset or pick a zone by hand; choosing the city sets the correct time zone for you, and daylight saving is handled automatically from then on.
Most time zone tools make you think in offsets: pick UTC+1, remember it becomes UTC+2 in summer, hope you got the dates right. Atlas takes the opposite approach. You add a city, and the city carries its own rules. That single decision removes most of the friction in tracking the world.
How do I add a city?
Start typing the name of the place you want to follow. As you type, matching cities appear; pick one and it is pinned to your world map. The moment it lands, you see its current local time, and Atlas shades that person's working hours so you can tell at a glance whether it is a sensible moment to reach them.
- Search for the city by name.
- Select it from the matches to pin it on the map.
- Read its live local time, with working hours shaded.
There is no separate step to choose a time zone, enter an offset, or set up daylight saving. The city already knows all of that. If you would rather not leave what you are doing, you can summon Atlas from anywhere with the Quick Check keyboard shortcut and add a place without switching apps.
Why track a city instead of an offset?
An offset is only a snapshot. "UTC+1" describes London in winter but not in summer, and it tells you nothing about when the clocks change. A city, by contrast, is a complete package: its base offset, whether it observes daylight saving, and the exact dates its clocks shift each year.
When you track the city, Atlas always resolves the correct local time, even on the morning a daylight saving change takes effect. You stop memorising offsets and stop second-guessing whether summer time has started somewhere. The place does the remembering for you.
| You track | What you get |
|---|---|
| A raw offset (UTC+1) | Correct for part of the year, silently wrong after a clock change |
| A city (London) | Live local time, daylight saving handled, correct year-round |
Some places do not sit on a whole hour at all. Pin Mumbai and you get UTC+5:30; pin Kathmandu and you get UTC+5:45, no arithmetic required. For the story behind these, read why some time zones are 30 or 45 minutes off.
Can I pin two cities that share a zone?
Yes. Atlas tracks people and places, not just zones, so you can keep a teammate in Lisbon next to one in London even though they often share an offset. That matters because shared offsets do not stay shared: daylight saving rules differ from country to country, so two cities that match today can drift an hour apart for a few weeks of the year. Pinning each one separately means you always see the real difference.
You can also group your pins into teams, so a project's people sit together and you can read the whole group's day in one glance.
What happens once a city is pinned?
A pinned city is more than a clock. Atlas uses it to find the best overlapping window when you need to meet, shading everyone's working hours so the suggestion respects people's evenings and mornings. When you settle on a time, one tap adds the meeting to your calendar in each person's correct local time, with daylight saving accounted for. Adding the city up front is what makes all of that accurate.
The takeaway
Adding a city is the whole trick: search, pin, done. Because you track the place rather than a number, the local time you see is always right, the offsets you would otherwise forget are baked in, and the meetings you schedule land correctly for everyone. Browse the rest of our guides if you want to go deeper on the quirks of world time.
Frequently asked
How do I add a city or time zone to track?
Why track a city instead of a UTC offset?
Does Atlas handle daylight saving automatically?
What if two cities share the same time zone?
Stop doing timezone math
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