Work zone, local zone, and whoever you're talking to - and the third one moves.
We work on Eastern time and live on Pacific. That was a decision rather than an accident, and it has held for years - one fixed work clock, wherever we happen to be parked that month.
It sounds like a simplification, and mostly it is. It also means there are three time zones live at any given moment, and only two of them are ever on a screen.
Everything gets scheduled, planned and talked about in Eastern. Then I look up from it and it's three hours earlier outside than the day I've been having.
That's the trade, and on its own it's fine - one consistent clock in exchange for never quite standing in it. The days it stops being fine are the days a third zone turns up.
The usual advice is to pick one zone and set everything to it. I went one better - the computer holds one, the calendar holds the other, so both are visible without doing sums in the morning.
It helps. It only helps so much, and it's worth being precise about where it stops. You are never working across two time zones. You are working across three: the one you work on, the one you're standing in, and the one belonging to whoever you're talking to. That third one changes with every person.
There is no third device. So the conversion that actually catches you out is the one with nowhere to live but your head.
The call you would expect to be easy is the worst one. Someone in the same city as me - same coast, same daylight, same weather out the window - and to put a time in front of them I go Pacific to Eastern for how the work is planned, then back to Pacific for them. Two conversions to talk to somebody nearby.
Everyone writes about the call with London. Nobody warns you about the call with the person down the road.
One to one, you can hold it in your head, badly. Three or more and there's no single translation to hold at all - each person is their own sum, and they don't stay lined up as the hour moves. That's the point where being careful stops being a strategy.
What actually fixed this was laying it out instead of calculating it. I load in every person as their own row, even when two of them are in the same zone. A duplicate row isn't waste - it's the entire point. I'm not looking up an offset for a person, I'm looking at where everybody is and watching the hour move across the whole group at once.
That's the technique whether or not you use my tool for it. Waypoint is the version I built for myself: one day, every zone, side by side, drag the block until it works for everyone.
The work zone doesn't stay in work. My calendar runs on Eastern, always - which means a personal thing, dinner or a booking or something with nothing to do with work at all, sometimes has to be translated into Eastern to get entered correctly. And every time I schedule anything I check which zone the event actually saved in, because that is where it goes wrong quietly.
I still get it wrong. Not late, though - early. I've logged into more meetings an hour early than I'd like to admit, because the part of me that knows what time it is is still living in the other zone.
That's what's working right now. When it stops working, or something better turns up, that goes out on Substack. Nothing else does.
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