What timezone do you use in conversation with a distributed team?

Question

We are scattered around there world, originally with a core group on the west coast. So we kind of use PT + relative time, like..."Let's sync about X at 1pm PT in ~3 hours"Which works okay, but I don't love how it forces the non west coast people to do the extra time conversion step all the time. Not that that's so hard, but it is not so egalitarian as I would like to be striving for.So we are wondering about switching to UTC in conversation. Has anyone tried that? Or used any tools that were actually effective at normalizing time references in conversation? How do you do it?

davismwfl · Accepted Answer

Our team is on the coasts of the US and all over India right now. Luckily India uses one timezone, but it is an oddity with a 30 minute offset instead of 1 hr. Anyway, in my google calendars I show both the IST and my local timezone so that while setting meeting we can easily tell people at the extremes what the time is. I also use the worldtimebuddy website (and Klok app on iOS) to show all the timezones so I can tell people the times when I am setting a meeting time. This way no one has to do the math. It takes 2 seconds to glance at the website or app and see everyones timezones and write it down or say it on a call.What would be better is if we could add more than 2 timezones to google calendar, then it'd be easier. But still not hard. My rule is the place that has the bulk of the people is who gets the most favorable time for the meeting. That way if 4 people are in one TZ and one person in another, we inconvenience the one person, if anyone has to be, not the 4. For some meetings I have switched it up, when it is me and one other person I will alternate who does late vs early etc, so it is a shared burden. This helps the team all feel equal, regardless of title or position.

montroser · Answer

Another potential bonus for UTC is that generally logs and database entries are in UTC, so when troubleshooting I imagine that could be one click easier if we're already used to thinking in that mode.