Time zoning out

I’m on the West Coast. I have clients in every US time zone, plus several outside the US, and some of my clients are multinationals with offices all over the place. In the last two weeks alone, I’ve needed information from people in Massachusetts, Texas, California, Illinois, the UK, Kuwait, Singapore, and Japan. Sometimes, email won’t do; that means someone has to get up early or stay up late to make a phone call, and that someone is usually me. I occasionally think it would be nice to have an assistant to take the night shift.

This morning I had a phone call scheduled at 10am Central time. That’s 8am my time. Except that when I put it on my calendar, I added two hours instead of subtracting them, so it looked like I was supposed to make the call at noon. As a result, I scheduled another call for 8am, and another at 9am, and by the time I got off the phone, it was several hours after the time I was supposed to make the original call. Now, of course, that person has long since moved on to the rest of his day.

I know I’m not the only person in the world who’s dealt with this. I still sometimes need to remind people on the East Coast that setting up a conference call at 9am Eastern pretty much guarantees I won’t be able to make it, as I’m not awake, never mind caffeinated and coherent, at 6am Pacific. It’s just a fact of life. I need to figure out a better way to deal with it, that’s all.

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