Help for managing time zones

To ensure that we don’t miss important calls from our clients, we automatically forward after-hours phone calls to our office to the cell phone of one of our managers. For a time, one potential vendor had an eager-beaver sales rep who could not manage time zones. He would call us every Monday as soon as he arrived in the office. The problem was that his office was in New York; so 8:00 a.m. his time was 6:00 a.m. our time. Being awakened each week by his call ringing on my cell phone helped ensure that we gave all our business to his competitor.

Many of us live our lives struggling to manage connections in multiple time zones. With colleagues, vendors, customers, friends and family increasingly scattered around the world, it has become important to be aware of the time in many different places.

The analogy that comes to mind is the game Twister. I start off the day focused on life in the Mountain time zone, so I have to be careful not to call my son too early in California. And later in the day, I have to avoid missing the cut-off times for my distributor in Illinois. We buy and sell a lot of Dell computers, so the time in Texas is also important to us. By the end of the day, I am just glad that it is time for dinner.

Even the cheapest digital watches usually come with the ability to track at least two time zones. Why not our computers? Of course, the question is rhetorical because our computers can handle multiple time zones quite easily.

For example, Microsoft has provided a free utility that seamlessly integrates with Windows to track the time in as many as five different locations. Microsoft Time Zone is available at www.microsoft.com/downloads. Once you are at the website, you will need to enter the keywords “Time Zone” in the search bar to find it.

When you have downloaded the Time Zone utility and installed it, the program places a small icon in your system tray, which is the collection of icons in the lower right-hand corner of your display. To me, the icon resembles a globe with a small clock face on top, but my colleague thinks it might be a party hat. Clearly, the clock motif makes sense, but the party hat would be consistent with the attitude of one former co-worker. This person used to justify leaving work early by saying “Well, it must be five o’clock somewhere in the world.” With Time Zone, he could tell exactly where that place was.

Time Zone comes with a list of dozens of locations in the world you can choose to monitor. You can also add your own locations by right-clicking on the Time Zone icon and choosing Options. Double-clicking on the icon will display the time in the five locations you have chosen.

If you use Microsoft Outlook to manage your calendar as I do, there is also an easy way to keep track of an additional time zone in that application. Simply click on Tools > Options > Calendar Options > Time Zone > Show an Additional Time Zone. Be sure to label each time zone you are tracking to avoid getting confused. Click on OK to exit, and Outlook will place an additional column to the left of your daily or work-week calendar showing the time in the second time zone.

If you travel to another time zone, you can quickly switch Outlook to display your appointments in the new local time. To do so, click Tools > Options > Calendar Options > Time Zone > Swap Time Zones.

The world continues to shrink, so the ability to manage time in multiple locations will become ever more important.