Struggling With Time Zone Math

I am pretty good at math, but not so good at running math or, as I confirmed this weekend, time zone math.

Struggling With Time Zone Math

I spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to schedule Teams meetings with participants across several time zones, especially when each person shares their availability in their local time. I usually convert each person’s availability to ET, and hope there’s some overlap. (This is definitely a task I need to delegate to ChatGPT.)

When I was scheduling meetings for my trip to Copenhagen, I asked the people I would be meeting with to send me meeting invitations so they would land on my Outlook calendar at the correct times, but also wrote the times on a paper calendar so I could plan my days. I just could not get my head around meetings scheduled to start at 3 am in my Outlook view.

Coming to Arizona for our firm retreat, I knew I had to arrive early for a meeting on Friday. I thought the meeting was at 10:00 am because there already was a meeting on my calendar at 2:00 pm, which I thought was the main opening event that started at 4:00 pm. As it turns out, that 2:00 pm meeting was a 12:00 pm meeting that I thought was at 10:00 am, and the main opening event started at 4:00 pm local time. I was doing the time zone math backwards. 🤦‍♀️

My biggest time zone math error was my Garmin’s fault. My Garmin gets the time from my cell phone, so when I change time zones, I need to sync my Garmin for it to adjust. I couldn’t get it to sync yesterday and didn’t want to restart my phone and risk losing the emails sitting on my phone (during the Outlook outage), so I went to bed planning to deal with it in the morning. Can you guess what happened?

When I woke up, I saw on my watch that it was almost 5:30, and decided to get up before my alarm at 6 am. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, put gym clothes on, and I was tying my running shoes noticed the bedside clock said it was 3:35. I was rolling my eyes at the unreliability of  hotel room clocks when I realized it was my Garmin that was wrong. 😩😩😩 Since I knew I was in for a long day, I took my sneakers off, got back in bed, and tried to get some more sleep. 😴

I’m still participating in National Blog Poasting Month. Learn more and see the list of participating bloggers here.

Do you struggle with time zone math?