When I was growing up, if someone mentioned time zones, all I could think of was a pocket full of 20c pieces, and George St, Sydney. Ah, the glory days of arcade gaming. It is entirely possible I spent way too much of my time as a child playing video games, and I can still play a pretty mean game of pinball once my fingers get warmed up. But that’s enough about the past, time to focus on the topic at hand.

At some point in time, we all have to deal with working across time zones for work and/or personal reasons. Thankfully over the last few versions the way our software copes with this different time zones has gotten much better, reducing the reliance on some of the small tools and utilities we may have relied on in the past. In this post I will mention a few of the ones I use at least weekly, and many of them on a daily basis.

First off, let’s take a look at what the operating system provides. Windows Vista made some huge improvements here in terms of allowing you to easily see the times in a couple of extra locations, and Windows 7 refined the appearance of this. By hovering over the time display in the notification area we can see that I have set up an additional two time zones. Clicking the time and date gives you a more detailed view.

The process for doing this is very easy, it’s just a matter of accessing the time accessing Date and Time as many of us have done regularly, and then accessing the Additional Clocks tab.

But what if you need more time zones displayed at a glance? For the times when I need more, I just use the Clock Gadget (again, it was in Windows Vista, and is also in Windows 7). As I prefer to work with maximised windows, having items on the desktop is usually not the best approach for me, but for some it could be a better alternative.

This is all well and good for getting a quick view of the time, but doesn’t really help when meetings need to be scheduled across time zones, or flights that cross multiple time zones need to be entered into your calendar. Outlook has had the ability to list two time zones in the calendar view for quite a while, and while this is useful for some things, it’s not the only way we can deal with times.

When you create a new calendar item or meeting request in recent versions of Outlook, clicking on Time Zones allows you to choose the time zones from drop down lists, taking out the guesswork.

Hopefully some of these tips come in handy for you, if you’ve got additional tips or software recommendations for enhancing this further let me know in the comments.