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This is unlikely. I work with people all over the world and generally we communicate our own time zone plus the top local time zone for our audience. In an org
by condiment 2y ago
This is unlikely. I work with people all over the world and generally we communicate our own time zone plus the top local time zone for our audience.
In an organization where people are accustomed to indexing their activities to other people who live in a different time zone, it’s actually easier to use the most common time zones than it is to switch everyone to UTC. When using UTC, you have to do the mental gymnastics twice. You first have to relate your own time zone to UTC, and second relate your audience time zone to it. But what happens in practice is that you quickly learn what times in your local time zone correspond to movements of the day in your peer time zones. And because everybody has the same mental model, it’s easier (and less error prone) to just to use local time zones.
- phantom784 2y agoOur team has members in every US timezone. I find I'll often try and use relative times in conversation, e.g. "after the stand-up" or "at the top of the hour" rather than specifying a wall clock time.
- BurningFrog 2y agoI agree for simple cases like this. But the more timezones the participants are in, the harder this approach gets.
- taeric 2y agoI'm actually surprised more chat programs don't automatically "internationalize and localize" dates. Seems the same effort they put into spotting a username could look for dates in the user's locale, and then render it in the appropriate one everywhere. We'd need some conventions to indicate it should not change the date, maybe. Most uses would probably be fine with not having that.