The small jobs that interrupt your day
Eleven tools for the two-minute tasks that break your focus — scheduling across time zones, sharing a link as a QR code, working out a date, splitting a bill, writing down something you'll need in ten minutes. No account, no app to install.
The short answer
The recurring small tasks in a working day mostly have a free browser tool: use a Time Zone Meeting Planner to find a slot that works across regions, an ICS Calendar Event Generator to send an invite anyone's calendar accepts, a QR Code Generator to move a link to someone's phone, a Date Calculator for deadlines and durations, and an Online Notepad for text you need for the next ten minutes. None require an account, and each takes under a minute.
Scheduling
getting people in a roomHalf the friction in arranging anything is time-zone arithmetic done badly, and the other half is an invite the other side's calendar won't parse.
Dates & durations
deadlines, ages, elapsed timeCounting days by hand goes wrong at month boundaries, and it goes very wrong across a leap year. These do the arithmetic properly.
Sharing & handoff
moving something to someone elseGetting a link onto a phone, a contact into an address book, or a signature into an email client — all small, all annoying without the right generator.
Scratch space & money
the miscellaneous two minutesSomewhere to put text you'll need shortly, and the one piece of arithmetic that reliably causes an argument at the end of a meal.
Time zones are worse than you think
Scheduling across regions goes wrong in ways that feel like carelessness but are actually structural. The offset between two cities is not a constant — it changes several times a year, on different dates, in different directions.
The US and Europe both observe daylight saving but switch on different weekends, so for a couple of weeks each spring and autumn the gap between New York and London is an hour off what everyone has memorised. The southern hemisphere shifts the opposite way, which means the gap between London and Sydney is nine hours for part of the year and eleven for another part, passing through ten in between. India is offset by thirty minutes, Nepal by forty-five. And a meeting booked as a fixed offset rather than as real zones will silently drift when a transition lands between booking and meeting.
Time Zone Meeting Planner resolves actual zones for the actual date, which is the only reliable way to do this.
- 1Using GMT and BST interchangeably
London is GMT in winter and BST (GMT+1) in summer. "GMT" written in June is ambiguous and usually means the sender was an hour out.
- 2Scheduling into a DST transition
A recurring 9am call booked before a clock change moves for one side and not the other. Recurring meetings need real zones, not offsets.
QR codes are just a link in a different shape
A QR code has no intelligence in it. It's an encoding of a short string — almost always a URL — and its whole value is moving that string from a screen you control to a phone you don't, without anyone typing it.
That's genuinely useful: a wifi password for a guest, a menu on a table, a form link on a slide, a payment page at a market stall. QR Code Generator produces one in a few seconds. Going the other way, if someone sends you a screenshot of a code, QR Code Decoder reads it without needing a second phone to point at your monitor.
- Symptom
- Printed flyer's code scans on some phones, not others
- Cause 1
- Code printed at 1.5cm — too small for the amount of data encoded
- Cause 2
- Low error correction, and the print smudged across two modules
- Cause 3
- The long tracking URL forced a denser grid than needed
- Fix
- Shorten the URL, raise error correction, print at 2.5cm or larger
More encoded data means a denser grid, and a denser grid needs more physical size to stay scannable. Shortening the URL is usually the highest-leverage fix. Test the final artwork with QR Code Decoder before it goes to print.
Date arithmetic that survives February
"Ninety days from today" seems like something you can do in your head, and it mostly is, until the range crosses a month with 31 days, or February, or a leap year. Contractual deadlines and notice periods are exactly where being one day out is expensive.
Date Calculator handles the boundaries. For elapsed time rather than calendar dates — a 9,000-second job that you want expressed as hours and minutes — Time Duration Formatter does the conversion, and if you're reading timestamps out of a log or an API, Date-Time Format Converter moves between the formats.
Small handoffs, done once properly
A few of these are worth doing once and then reusing forever.
An email signature is the obvious one: Email Signature HTML Generator produces markup that survives Outlook, which is a genuinely low bar that hand-written HTML routinely fails to clear — Outlook renders email with a rendering engine that ignores most modern CSS, so a signature that looks fine in Gmail can collapse entirely.
A vCard from vCard Contact File Generator is the reliable way to hand someone your details, because it imports directly rather than being retyped from an image. And Online Notepad covers the case that a text editor is overkill for — somewhere to park a paragraph, an order number or a snippet of output for the next ten minutes.
Which one do I want?
Several tools here overlap. The short version:
| Time Zone Meeting Planner vs ICS Calendar Event Generator | Working out which hour actually suits everyone. | Sending the agreed slot so it lands correctly in their calendar. |
|---|---|---|
| Date Calculator vs Time Duration Formatter | Calendar dates — deadlines, notice periods, ages. | Elapsed time — turning seconds into hours and minutes. |
| QR Code Generator vs vCard Generator | Moving a link to a phone via a camera. | Handing over contact details that import without retyping. |
| Online Notepad vs a text editor | Parking something for the next ten minutes, nothing to install. | Anything you'll still need tomorrow. |
Why this set
These are interruptions, not projects. Every tool here opens and finishes faster than finding an app that does the same job.
No account for a QR code, no subscription to work out a date. Nothing you type is uploaded.
The moments you need these — at a table, in a meeting, at a market stall — often aren't at a desk.
Questions
Do QR codes expire?
The code itself never expires — it's a static encoding of a string. What expires is whatever it points to. If a code stops working, the URL behind it moved or the link shortener retired it; the printed square is unchanged.
Why did my meeting invite arrive at the wrong time?
Almost always because the time was sent as text rather than as a calendar event, or the event was created with a fixed UTC offset instead of a named time zone. Offsets change with daylight saving; zones handle it. Send an .ics file and the recipient's calendar converts correctly.
Why does my email signature break in Outlook?
Outlook renders HTML email with an engine that ignores most modern CSS — flexbox, grid and many positioning rules simply don't apply. Signatures that rely on them collapse. Generated signature markup uses the older table-based structure that survives it.
Is anything I type into the notepad stored on a server?
The scratchpad keeps your text in the browser so it survives a refresh, rather than sending it anywhere. Treat it as scratch space rather than storage — it's for the next ten minutes, not for anything you'd be upset to lose.
How large should a printed QR code be?
It depends on how much data is encoded and how far away it will be scanned. More data means a denser grid, which needs more physical size. As a rule, shorten the URL first, use a higher error-correction level for anything printed, and test the final artwork by decoding it before it goes to press.