How to Avoid Time Zone Confusion in Google Calendar – Jenny’s Weekly Tip #2

How to avoid TimeZone confusions in Google Calendar

I hope that last week’s tip benefited you in some way, and if not, lets hope this weekly tip can make a difference to your working day. This week we are sticking with Google Apps, more specifically the Google Calendar. So, if you want to avoid TimeZone confusion when setting up a new event in the Google Calendar, read on.

Here is an example of timezone issue:

Say you live in the Pacific time zone but you’re taking a trip to the Eastern time zone. You’ve got to set up a meeting at 11am for when you’re there, so you open Google Calendar and create an event for 11am. The problem? When you’re there, GCal will auto-convert that meeting to 2pm to accommodate the time zone change.

So to get it right, you’d need to mentally convert your new event to 8am when you create it so that when you’re in EST, it’ll correctly convert to 11am.

However, there is a simple solution to this:

If you creating an event with Google Calendars Quick Add box (pictured, and accessible from the keyboard by hitting ‘q’), just type the event description, time, and add the time zone after the time. And Google Calendar will take care of the rest.

 

However, you can also change the timezone through the ‘Create event page’. Simply  click the Timezone link next to the event time and set your timezone there.

To do this follow the instructions below:

1. Click Edit to populate the event and change the Time Zone.

2. Click Time Zone as shown below:

3. Once you have clicked ‘TimeZone’, continue to select the zone in which you would like the event to be set to.

4. Once you have selected the timezone, click ‘Done’ to save the time change.

 

And that’s it! May all your international meetings be correctly scheduled. See you next week for the next tip.