Is EST more memorable than EDT? And why don’t people just say “Eastern time?”
Perhaps this is an excellent example of why standards matter. As our calendars go up into the cloud, the difference between Standard and Daylight time becomes ever-more important.
In the past month, I’ve had a dozen different telephone meetings where the other person has proposed a time using Eastern Standard Time…even though it’s technically Eastern Daylight Time — we won’t change over for another week, and that makes all the difference when all of your telephone calls are suddenly an hour earlier (or later) than you expected.
One of my colleagues had accepted my meeting invite for 1:30PM EDT, but his computer’s calendar was set to Pacific Standard Time which he had transposed into Eastern time. So he thought the telephone call was at 11:30 AM Eastern.
And then there is this thing that Google Calendar does. If you use Google Apps, Gmail will see that you’re scheduling an appointment and will adjust accordingly. Although, Google’s engineers can’t seem to get it straight. So a recent e-mail inviting me to a phone call at 9:30 AM EST helpfully tried to correct for the difference between EDT and EST and suggested a calendar entry at 10:30AM EDT. The correct time should have been 8:30AM EST.
I became a stickler for time zones a long time ago when I had the responsibility of running a global nonprofit. I was on the phone early in the morning with people in Europe. And the calls with AsiaPac were usually in the evening. Some countries use Daylight time, and others do not. And Western Europe used to shift to Daylight time a week before we did in the U.S. — there were times where a call to Norway was a seven-hour time difference and not the usual six.
In all of those phone calls and meetings, we followed two simple protocols:
- Every telephone number began with a plus symbol “+” followed by a country code, and
- All times were local. So if someone in Helsinki scheduled a call for 1600 his time, it was your responsibility to keep track of the time zones and to schedule appropriately.
The amazing thing was that nobody had any problems with this approach. We made our meetings with minimal stress and virtually no rescheduling.
So why is it so difficult these days? Is it that we’re so influenced by technology that we begin inserting verbiage to sound more precise than we actually are? Is local time too complicated?
I’ll leave with this simple anecdote. My wife was a flight attendant for a number of years. Every month, we got a set of schedules with the trips on them. And there was the simple line at the bottom of each one, “All times PIT local.” Everything was scheduled according to the time it was in Pittsburgh, PA — regardless of whether you were in Rome or San Diego. Simple enough to run an airline, and simple enough to follow.
From here on out, the next time I get a meeting invite that specifies EST or EDT, I’ll just clarify with “PIT local.”