by Zach F

Created on: December 11, 2010

In today’s world of international business, travel, and even social networking, being able to quickly and easily convert times from one time zone to another is ever important.  There are literally thousands of free tools online, and although all are great for certain purposes, knowing which tool is the right for you will make life in today’s global society much more convenient.

For the curious, who simply want to know the difference in times between two places, http://www.happyzebra.com/timezones-worldclock/diffe rence.php is the perfect tool.  It allows users to find the difference, in hours, between the time in an two places.

Although using this tool, it would be fairly simple to figure out the time in a different time zone, why do the math when there are several tools available that do the math for the user.  For instance, for a quick reference, http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ lists dozens of cities around the world with their current time and date, as well as lets the reader know whether or not the city is currently on summer, or daylight savings, time.

If, on the other hand, you are trying to plan ahead, http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc lists the current time in GMT, the standard “baseline” for timekeeping, as well as allows you to convert either the current time or a future time between any two time zones in the world.  This tool also allows for saving settings, as long as cookies are enabled in the browser.

For those of us less accustomed to changing time zones, we may not always know the closest major city to our destination.  For the casual traveler, http://www.travelmath.com/time-difference/ allows you to use the city name, or even the airport code, to convert times between different time zones.
Finally, for the businessperson or expat who frequently needs to convert times, but usually between the same two or three time zones, http://www.world-time-zones.org/cgi-bin/util/time-di fferene.cgi is a great tool.  It allows you to create a chart showing time differences between two or three different time zones.  This chart can then be bookmarked, or even printed, for future reference.  This is perfect for someone who is consistently scheduling business calls, or even Skype dates, with people in the same foreign locale.

Using these tools, anyone can increase the convenience and accuracy of their adjustment to our new global society.

Learn more about this author, Zach F.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.