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0 pointstallanvor5y ago0 comments

What if you're scheduling a meeting for multiple people, and normally you're in Seattle, but for some of these meetings you'll be in New York? You don't want the meeting to be at 8:00 your time because chances are the people in Seattle aren't going to join your call at 5:00 their time.

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ubermonkey5y ago

As someone who routinely sets meetings for people in multiple timezones, let me say this isn't confusing.

All the calendaring tools I use or am aware of, at this point, keep up with time zone correctly (or have so far). I set the meeting for, say, 10 CST, and it's clear to my colleagues in Seattle that it will be 8 for them, just as it's clear for my coworkers in DC that it'll be 11.

kevincox5y ago

There are still edge cases.

What if you schedule a meeting in a year's time in a timezone that doesn't have Daylight Savings Time but that government decides to add it and now the meeting is at a time that doesn't exist?

But your use case it also talking about when using a tool that is specifically designed to deal with this issue. What about when you are trying to find a good time (AFAIK most calendars don't have good tooling for collaboratively choosing a meeting time). If you do this in your favourite chat app then you probably have no timezone support. (This would be an awesome feature though)

Schiendelman5y ago

Real calendar applications handle this by storing the scheduled time as GMT, and the UI adds an offset for where users are. This also solves the problem of you driving between time zones between the time that you schedule the meeting and the time that you attend it.

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bslorence5y ago

Twice a year we have to deal with calendar screw-ups because a third of our employees are in a locale that doesn't observe DST and the rest are in locales that do observe it. If an employee from that first group sets up a recurring meeting, the meeting time changes for everyone else in March and November.

detaro5y ago

A meetings timezone can be independent of a users, yes. E.g. the meeting time should be specified as e.g. "8:00 America/Los_Angeles" (or have a location-based lookup, but thats another level of indirection). That way it follows whatever DST rules there are, but your local phone time being in NY time only affects your display.

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