By Nella Marov-Perez, Customer Care Manager, FreeConferenceCall.com
Phew! After more than a dozen circuitous emails, that global meeting has finally been digitally inked into the calendar. That is, of course, until you realize that the time everyone confirmed would be 3 a.m. for the guy in Mumbai. And suddenly, you’ve slid back to the beginning of the planning process.
Scheduling meetings can sometimes feel a bit like a bad game of Chutes and Ladders. When you factor in the math for wildly divergent time zones, the ups and downs really multiply. Here’s the good news: You’re not stuck in this cycle of perpetual emails for good. Thanks to a few totally free and highly useful tools, planning a meeting across time zones can be practically painless.
Tools of the Trade
Every Time Zone and World Chat Clock are two tools that make scheduling meetings in different time zones visually pleasing. Every Time Zone allows users to easily view and manipulate local time across every time zone, while World Chat Clock lets users swing a dial around the clock to find overlapping office hours.
If you don’t care about the high-tech design of a user interface, consider the World Clock Meeting Planner from TimeandDate.com. It might not be pretty, but the color-coded table format is straightforward and hard to screw up. A big benefit is the ability to click on the time and date link to add it directly to your calendar. You might consider adding all proposed meeting times to your calendar, just so you don’t double-book while awaiting confirmation.
Finally, ensure your meeting comes off without a hitch by choosing international conferencing through FreeConferenceCall.com. A free account gives users local dial-in numbers in almost 60 countries, so participants don’t get stuck paying high fees for international calling.
With these tools at the ready, you will never again let scheduling meetings across time zones get you down.