Learning Conversations

Going from a job where everything is UK-centric to one where I'm now working with people from across the US, Australia and Europe, I've had to get to grips with time zones pretty quickly.

There have been a couple of embarrassing moments when I miscalculated, and ended up joining online meetings an hour late!

Half the problem comes because most people tend to use their local time-zone abbreviation. That's fine if you're all in the same country, and know what those abbreviations mean. But when you're working globally it's a recipe for confusion.

For example, how is someone to know whether Eastern Standard Time (EST) refers to EST in Australia or EST in North America? Does CST refer to China Standard Time, Central Standard Time (Australia), Central Standard Time (Central and North America), or Cuba Standard Time?

It gets even more confusing when some countries (like the UK) change their clocks in the summer (for some strange, historical reason that seems to be to do with farmers in Scotland...).

So to work out when a meeting should take place, I need to check with my colleagues which timezone they're in (checking the country to make sure) then work out the time difference between them and me. And everyone else in the meeting will need to do the same.

Wouldn't it be much easier if there was a common reference point, so all we had to do was a quick calculation without all the complex looking up of individual time zone differences?

Well, it exists. It's called UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). Every time zone is then defined as being UTC ± an integer number of hours.

So, currently, I'm at UTC +1 (although that changes in October when the UK goes back to UTC Zero time)

Boulder, Colorado, USA, (Mountain Daylight Time) is at UTC - 6

L'viv, Ukraine (Eastern European Summer Time) is at UTC + 3

So, the only information anyone needs to provide, to arrange a meeting, is their UTC time zone offset, ie. UTC+1, UTC-6 and UTC+3

There's no need for anyone to go looking for a time-zone convertor

Let's say the meeting is at 08:00 UTC-6

For me, in the UK, the difference between -6 and +1 = +7, so I know that the meeting is at 3pm my time.

For colleagues in L'viv, the meeting is at