Here are some tips I've picked up for smoother online conversations, particularly around scheduling.
- Don't say "summer" or "fall". Say the month, or the range of months.
- Say "my morning" rather than "the morning".
- Use 24-hour time.
- In real-time conversations, say "in 2 hours time" rather than "at 10".
- Always include the timezone. Avoid using local abbreviations (e.g. PST), instead use offset from UTC.
- Better still, just give the time in UTC.
- Know your UTC offset.
- Use a timezone-aware meeting planner. You'll get the arithmetic wrong otherwise.
- Say "Oct 7" rather than 10/7 or 7/10. Everyone speaks English, but not everyone uses your dialect.
- The time that you end a meeting is more important than when you start it. Thoughtfully consider the timezones of other attendees when you are planning for & participating in meetings.
Violating these rules isn't a big deal, since people can generally figure out what you mean. Following them, however, can speed things along and sometimes even avoid tedious conversations.
5 comments:
Agreed. I'd add "Use the metric system".
I think all of those things are very good bits of advice, although I'd perhaps have put them in a different order. The one I'd really like to bash into people's heads is to either give times in UTC or local time & UTC offset. I can never remember what EDT or PST and so on are.
I would also say:
* be careful talking about days, particularly when close the date line. My Tuesday is not the same as Jamu's Tuesday, or at least not for very long.
* DST sucks bright red donkey balls.
Also, some of the local timezone acronyms are ambiguous: both USians and Australians call their eastern time zone EST/EDT.
So, what Michael said.
Michael, Mary, yes, avoiding local abbreviations" is important.
I wish I thought of the "today" thing.
“Use 24 hour time”: yes. Also, use ISO-8601 date formats, i.e. 2009-10-07. It's unambiguous between locales, *and* you get to know what year the writer was talking about.
Why are USAians so averse to putting the danged *year* in their dates?
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