When I moved to Japan, I internalized that it was 13 hours between my new home and my old. My old happened to be Indiana, which at the time did not follow Daylight Savings Time and so it was on Eastern Standard Time in the Winter and Central Standard Time in the Winter as the rest of the US changed around them.

A few years after I was here, Indiana republicans finally succeeded in ramming through a DST bill, which they had been trying to do for decades and had always been defeated as the idea of DST was hugely unpopular in the state with everyone except business. So now I had to memorize 13 hours time difference in summer and 14 hours in winter. Still not too bad. The other tricky bit was when DST actually started and ended, which I sometimes missed.

Then some years ago, during COVID, I started to teach more and more remote classes. Most were in Japan, but many others were in various other countries: Korea, Germany, France, etc, including various places in the US that were not in the Eastern Time Zone that I had memorized because of my home state. Things were getting confusing. I couldn't and can't remember the differences in all these time zones. Throw in places like India which add in half hours (India is 3 and a half hours behind Japan) and I quickly realized I need help keeping track of everything

I stumbled upon two solutions, one on the web and one for the iPhone.

Every Time Zone

This is an awesome site that likes up every time zone, one above the other, and lets you draw a bar to the exact time you need, which will then show the exact time in every other time zone. Simple and great. My default it shows every time zone, but you can create an account and set just the time zones you care about to display, simplifying things even further.

As you can see, it shows a line for your current time (the purple line), then you can drag a second line for your desired time. The second line has a link you can send people which will show them the exact time you have set that green line for in whatever their time zone happens to be.

I love this site and use it often. Not only for work related things, but also when I am trying to schedule things with various Hive friends. I can't recommend this site enough.

Go here: Every Time Zone

Onetime

This is an app I stumbled upon not long ago. It takes a different approach than simply lining the time zones up like Every Time Zone does. Instead it displays a globe that you can rotate and as you rotate it, it shows the local time for every place you add to it.

That photo may not entirely help you understand how it works. It's easier to understand when it motion, so here is a short video.

^{(note: why did youtube add the black frames on the left and right sides of the video??)}

You can see, in addition to the globe metaphor, it also allows us to easily see when it is sundown or sunup for any given time zone.

It's really cool! I think I like the web app better—it is more straight forward and easier to grasp quickly—but the iPhone app does give a unique way of looking at things that is helpful sometimes.

Go here (if you have an iPhone): Onetime

Anyway, there you go. Both web app and iPhone app are free, so use both without fear. I recommend both!

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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.