Coordinating schedules isn’t easy
But there are lots of tools to help
When I was a freelancer, I spent six weeks living with friends in Sydney, Australia. And while at times it felt like a long vacation, I was working for most of the trip.
For one story, I had set up a phone interview with a researcher in Cairns, up the coast from Sydney. At the agreed-upon time, I gave the researcher a ring. “You’re an hour early,” he said. And that’s when I discovered that New South Wales, where Sydney is located, undergoes time shifting for daylight savings and Queensland, where Cairns is found, does not.
I think every reporter must have a similar story. Daylight savings is annoyingly inconsistent across the globe. And time zones complicate everything. So when Rebekah White asked in my new form for submitting your organizational problems for me to find a tool that would help her “calculate future times depending on when various countries change to daylight savings,” I knew I could help.
Does anyone’s calendar actually look like this? (CC0 public domain)
My first thought was timeanddate.com, which has a meeting planner. Select the cities where each participant is located, put in the date of the meeting and you can see the whole day laid out by color. Green times are where you can find each participant’s business hours. Yellow is non-working hours, and red is sleepy time. There’s also a simple time zone converter, which lets you select multiple locations to see the time across all of them on a specific date. However, picking the date is rather clunky, and I find the meeting planner easier to use.
I tested whether the meeting planner included differences in daylight savings by comparing results for October 28 and November 4 for hypothetical participants in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Washington, D.C. Daylight savings ends in the U.K. on the last Sunday in October and in the U.S. on the first Sunday in November, so the week of October 28 should yield a different result (by one hour) than November 4. And it did.
Similar to timeanddate.com’s time zone converter (with a better interface) is World Time Buddy. Select your locations and date, and you can easily see what time it is at each location. It also passed the daylight savings test.
Another option is a doodle poll (a simple one is free). This service lets you pick potential times for a meeting and then poll participants. Each participant will see the available times in their own time zone, and doodle does take daylight savings into consideration. I like this because it puts the onus on other people to manage their schedules, particularly when paired with an Outlook or Google Calendar invite. Let technology do the heavy lifting here.
Similarly, Calendly also takes time zones and daylight savings into consideration. With this site, you can set times for which you are available and let people book time with you.
Rebekah, I hope one of these tools will help you through your meeting planning mess.
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In other time news, iPhone users will note some upgrades to the Calendar feature with iOS 18. I’m loving that I can see all my calendar items at once, stacked upon each other and color-coded by which calendar the item came from: my personal Google Calendar, my work Outlook calendar and then the random things I only put in my phone.
What are your favorite tools for managing time?
— Sarah
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