The recent daylight savings time shift got me wanting to mention the The World Clock Meeting Planner service. It's a great thing to use if you need to talk with people in different time zones, plus it's the closest thing to the ideal clock I've long wanted but feel doesn't exist.

For nearly twenty years now, I've constantly been having to think in different time zones. When I worked at the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times, my workday started at 9:30am Pacific Time. If I was working on a graphic involving a national story, that often meant needing to talk with an expert on the East Coast. As a result, I was three hours "down" on time to reach these people. I had to keep in mind that if I didn't reach them by 2pm my time, I probably wouldn't hear back, as that's 5pm back East. I learned to look at the clock and constantly think of East Coast time throughout the day.

For the past nine years, I've been in the UK and needing to talk with search engines based mostly in California. The plus is that this gives me lots of lead time "ahead" of any story. But the downside is knowing that 5pm my time is really when people are first really arriving at work in California and ready to talk or take calls. As you can imagine, I have a fair number of early evening calls that I do.

I can pretty much do both West Coast and East Coast time in my head when I'm in the UK. If someone says "can we talk at 10 Pacific," I know without much thinking that will be 6pm my time. But it can get tricky when I start dealing with odd times such as 1pm Pacific, people on Central or Mountain Time or when I'm dealing with those outside the US and UK.

Enter The World Clock Meeting Planner. It's awesome. Pick up to four places where you might want to talk with someone, push a button, and you get a chart showing what time it is throughout the day in those places.

In other words, it will tell you that 12pm London time will be 7am in New York and 4am in San Francisco -- not a good choice if you want to do a conference call with people in all those places at once. It even uses color coding to help you. Business hours in each place are green; early business hours are yellow and non-business hours are red.

What's a good time? You get all greens for 5pm London, which is Noon in New York and 9am in San Francisco:

It's a super handy service, and I only wish I could find a clock that's similar to it for my desk, that I could glance at.

Everyone's seen those "world clocks" that show you the current time in three or four places on different displays. Those are useless for doing forward planning, if you want to know what time it will be at some place at a future moment.

How about something like this clock, that Boing Boing recently featured. Again, useless. It's handy that you can roll it to find out the time NOW in a particular place. But if you're on the phone in England with someone in Los Angeles, and they say "let's talk again tomorrow at 2pm my time," what time will that be for you? Quick, quick! A glance at that clock won't tell you. But a glance at my ideal clock below would:

I want a clock with two or three rings of numbers. Inside is the current time for me. The outside ring could be rotated for a time zone you regularly deal with, such as Pacific. I can look at any hour in either time zone and know exactly what the time will be in the other place.

I know, the picture's ugly. I'm not an artist. But that's the idea of what I want, and despite much looking, I've never found it.

As long as I'm hoping, how about getting Outlook to let me enter a time based on when someone's talking about. So if we agree to a 5pm Pacific meeting, it would be nice if I could put that in at 5pm Pacific time and have Outlook automatically convert.

In case you're wondering, even the new Google Calendar isn't this smart. I typed into quick add "meeting at 5:30pm pacific time today" which nicely added the meeting to my calendar and at 5:30pm -- but 5:30pm GMT (which is in my settings) rather than 5:30pm Pacific.

Even better would be if Outlook wouldn't shift all my appointments on my Smartphone if I dare to let the time zone change out of GMT. But that's a story for a future post.

One last thing. If you are calling someone in another time zone, do find out the time before you call. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is as unimpressive as someone calling me at 11pm at night and starting off saying, "I don't know what time it is there but...."

I work at home, but late calls aren't an issue. I only hear them if I'm up and working in my office, so they don't bother me at all if I've gone to bed or I'm not working. What bothers me is that a statement like that shows that someone hasn't even bothered to consider whether they might be making a call at a bad time.

Hopefully, the World Clock Meeting Planner will help some of these people changing the opening line from "I don't know what time it is" to instead, "I know it's late, but I hope you don't mind me trying to catch you...."

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