These days it seems when I need to know the time, it’s for a different city or country. My weakness is converting international time zones. Such was the case today when I got an alert from my web hosting company informing me of an outage. The email provided the outage in their local time, but I wanted to post the times for readers in GMT and several time zones. Fortunately, there are some good tools on the web to help with these types of tasks.

Easy Time Zone Conversions

The are many time zone converters out there. Even Microsoft Outlook allows you to add multiple time zones if you have a daily need. The site I rely on the most is called TimeAndDate.com by Steffen Thorsen. It offers an easy form to enter your “Convert From Time Zone” and then the “Convert To Time Zone”. They also offer the ability to search in several different fashions. For example, the Other Locations option allows you to drill down further by country and then major cities.

Planning Meetings and Phone Calls

TimeAndDate.com also has a series of other useful tools. About once a month, I need to schedule a phone conference with people in several time zones. The greater the distance between the parties, the harder it can be to find the best time. This site makes it easier to find the best times by color-coding each zones work hours. The goal is to find one or more green slots for each location. As you get outside the normal working hours, the colors move to yellow and then to red. The site defines “normal working hours” as 8:00AM – 5:00PM.

Entering in the time zones for San Francisco, Ottawa and London, I can quickly see there are two common green slots. Since that last slot is encroaching on either someone’s lunch or quitting time, I know my best shot is to propose 8:00AM San Francisco time. The service allows you to enter in up to four cities. I’ve not had occasion to need more than that number. You can also opt to register and build a personal world clock with 25 different locations.

The site has plenty of other time and calendar tools that you should check out. And if this time change is getting you down, you can always use the site to see when you'll be 10,000 days old. I wonder if Hallmark cards has something to honor that day.

URL: http://www.timeanddate.com/
• Cost: Free

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