How to use the event time announcer
- Type a title for the event. This is optional, but it helps people recognize what the link is for.
- Enter the date and time of the event as it is announced.
- Choose the event’s time zone: pick the city the time refers to, or use your own time zone.
- Optionally add a duration, such as 90 minutes, so the page knows when the event ends.
The result shows the event converted to your own local time, with a live countdown. Before the start it reads “Starts in…”, during and after the event it reads “Started … ago”, and once the duration has passed it says “This event is over”. Below that, a table shows the time of the event in 12 world cities, which is handy when you write a post or an email.
Sharing the link
Share creates a link that contains the event itself, written in the URL fragment (the part after #). Each recipient who opens it sees the event in their own time zone and their own countdown, without doing any conversion. Nothing is stored on a server, so the link keeps working as long as you keep it, and there is no account to create.
Why one link beats a list of time zones
Event announcements often say something like “8 PM ET / 5 PM PT / 1 AM BST”. Lists like this are easy to get wrong:
- Daylight saving time changes on different dates in North America, Europe and the southern hemisphere, so a list copied from an earlier event can be an hour off.
- Abbreviations are ambiguous. CST can mean Central Standard Time or China Standard Time, and IST can mean India, Irish or Israel Standard Time. See time zone abbreviations for more examples.
- The date can change. An evening event in the Americas is already the next morning in Asia and Oceania, and readers there often miss that.
A link that converts automatically avoids all three problems, because each reader’s browser applies the rules for their own zone on the event’s date.
Example
An online event announced for 18:00 in London on a date in January appears like this:
| Reader in | Local time |
|---|---|
| New York | 13:00 the same day |
| Los Angeles | 10:00 the same day |
| Tokyo | 03:00 the next day |
| Sydney | 05:00 the next day |
In July, with summer time in London and New York and winter time in Sydney, the Tokyo and Sydney times move to 02:00 and 03:00. To find a time that suits everyone before you announce it, use the meeting planner. For a countdown on your own screen, try the countdown timer, and to compare two places directly, use the time difference calculator.