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Found a solid way to handle time zones when working with a team across three continents
My main client is in London, my dev team is in Manila, and I'm currently in Mexico City. For six months, meeting times were a mess and we missed deadlines. I finally made a shared Google Sheet with a simple formula that shows everyone's local time next to a single 'source' time in UTC. We all check it before setting anything. It cut our scheduling errors down to zero in the last two weeks. Has anyone else found a better tool for this, or is a spreadsheet still the way to go?
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wyattc762mo ago
Glad the sheet works for you, but I have to disagree that it's the best way. In my experience, those static sheets get outdated fast when someone travels or daylight saving hits. You end up managing a document instead of just seeing the time. I've moved my whole team to using a simple world clock app that auto updates, and it's one less thing to manually check.
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casey3931mo ago
Damn, that's a good point about daylight saving. I get burned by that every March and November when my guys in Manila forget to spring forward and I'm sitting here at 6am wondering why nobody showed up. Quick question for you though - when someone on your team travels and their timezone shifts, does the world clock app actually update in real time or do they have to manually switch their location in the app? Because that's the part I keep tripping over with my crew who bounce around.
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