When I set meetings with geographically dispersed participants, especially around the time of the Daylight Savings Time there is often a flurry of … “is 1PM EST the same as 10AM MST or 11AM MDT”? The confusion is often amplified by the use of “my time” and “your time”. Of course this increases exponentially with international attendees.

So, I started sending people to: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ to figure out the time difference for themselves. But, this link often goes unused as it just shows the offset of the current time and then you need to do some math… too much work.

Here is a very simple way to send date/time information to people to ensure that the meeting time is clearly communicated. Just hack the URL to the timeanddate.com site for your audience to use. That way participants can just click on the link to see when the meeting is held in their region.

Constructing a URL for the Word Time Clock

Example: a meeting planned for May 8, 2008 at 7:00PM MDT

Becomes: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=8&month=5&year=2008&hour=19&min=0&sec=0&p1=65

Root URL: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html

Parameters:

• day=8
• month=5
• year=2008
• hour=19 (use the 24 hour clock)
• min=0
• sec=0
• p1=65 (the time zone where the meeting originates, converted to a number)

Here’s some common time zone conversions (to get that “p1″ value) that timeanddate.com uses:

North American Time Zones

European Time Zones

South American Time Zones

Asian Time Zones

Australian Time Zones

If your timezone isn’t listed here, download this XLS document with all of the World Clock Options.

Of course, after I put all of this together, I learned that you can also just go to: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedform.html and fill out the form, but what’s the fun in that?