TIME and DATE ends your time zone meeting mismatch

(and now an actual conversation….)

High Tech Indian Dude: “So we’ll get together at say 9AM right?”
Becki: “Yep that’s great 9AM”.

*silence*

Becki: “is that 9am India or 9AM my time?”
High Tech Indian Dude: “umm, 9am my time”
Becki: “isn’t that like 1AM my time?”
High Tech Indian Dude: “I have no idea, can you make 9AM India time?”
Becki: “Umm, I’m not sure, I mean I don’t know what time that is for me”
High Tech Indian Dude: “Perhaps you can have more coffee and just be ready for our call”
Becki: *stunned silence* “Yeah well I guess I could do that; wouldn’t it be better to like pick a time that works for us both?”

With business being more and more multi-national and all of us wage-slaves taking on more tasks, having meetings in different time zones (and dimensions) is not uncommon. The problem comes in coordinating those meetings with the right times so people are actually awake at some reasonable hour for everyone and can have an intelligent, collaborative meeting.

The question is how do you do that?

At the Frugal Techie we tackled this problem with the gusto of a St Pauli Girl beer maiden brandishing steins of rich ale to thirsty Oktoberfest patrons. The answer we found was effective and cheap – key measures of a Frugal Tech’s dream!

The key tool is called Time and Date, and it’s alot of things, it’s a calendaring system, a world clock, a calendar generator, world time search, and, most importantly in our caffeine induced view, an outstanding time meeting planner.

Using the tool is a snap,

1. Click to the main page at: http://www.timeanddate.com/
2. Then click on the meeting planner option: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html
3. Then you choose your month, day and date
4. Then you can pick up to four cities to display
5. Then press the Show Timetable button and voila! A table of time zones by location. Each one lined up so you know when it’s 9AM Thursday in Boston, it’s 2PM Thursday in Casablanca.

One of the real joys in this tool is that it uses tables and color instead of graphics in it’s output. Because of this it’s easy to use and understand and it’s very fast.

So for your next conference, don’t be left scratching your head on what time to get everyone together, give Time and Date a try and make surprise everyone that you know what their time zone really is!

(Photo of clock courtesy of Elaron’s Photos, used under Creative Commons License)