The live hour
Booking the Only Hour You Both Have
Most failed international meetings are failures of arithmetic in the invitation rather than of availability, and the arithmetic errors cluster in four places.
Who is working when, for the people on this page
Our engineering office, Auckland
Working 08:00 to 17:00
The client's technical department, Lisbon
Working 08:00 to 17:00 their time, which is 19:00 to 04:00 here
two parties · five days of the seven are working days for all of them · Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri
Five working days a week in common and not one working hour. Everything on that contract was going to be written down whether anybody planned for it or not.
Before moving another call into somebody's evening, it helps to transparent attendance monitoring and check how the work is actually distributed across projects and days.
Teams can compare this approach with the established guidance available from OECD.
The same proposed time, as each party read it
“Shall we say two o'clock on Wednesday?”
You: Wed 14:00 · Them: Wed 17:00 — Sent without a zone to an office three hours ahead, who put it in their diary at their two o'clock
“Noon on Wednesday”
You: Wed 12:00 · Them: Wed 15:00 — Nobody said whose noon, and both diaries said noon
“Wednesday morning”
You: Wed 09:00 · Them: Wed 11:00 — Two different mornings, and the call happened at the second attempt
“Same time as last week”
You: Wed 09:00 · Them: Wed 10:00 — The clocks had changed here and not there, and nobody had noticed
four phrases · every one read as two different instants · the widest gap between the two readings is 3 hours
Four attempts to arrange one recurring call, and four different pairs of instants. Two of the four produced a call with nobody on it; the fifth attempt named a zone and has worked since. One team's own job.
A narrow overlap makes the booking itself expensive. If there are two usable hours in a week and one is lost to a misread invitation, half of the available contact time has gone.
The errors are not random. They cluster in four places and all four are avoidable in the text of the invitation.
The four
No zone named. "Two o'clock on Wednesday" is two o'clock somewhere. The recipient will put it in their diary at their own two o'clock roughly half the time.
A zone named but converted wrongly. More dangerous, because the recipient will not check a number given in their own time. The conversion is usually wrong by an hour, in spring or autumn.
A vague part of the day. Morning, afternoon, early. These name a position in somebody's day, and the two parties have different days.
"Same time as last week." Correct for about ten months of the year. Twice a year the clocks move on different dates in different countries, and a recurring arrangement silently shifts by an hour for two or three weeks.
The invitation that works
Send a calendar invitation rather than a sentence. It carries the zone in a form the recipient's software will convert correctly, and it survives the clock changes because it stores an instant rather than a local time.
Where a sentence is needed as well, give both times and name both zones:
Wednesday the 11th, 10:00 in Hamburg, which is 13:00 in Dubai. I have sent an invitation so it should appear correctly either way.
Two numbers and two places. If the conversion is wrong, the recipient will see it immediately, which is the point of giving both.
Recurring calls and the clock changes
The dates on which clocks move differ between countries, and the weeks in between are where recurring arrangements break.
| Period | What happens |
|---|---|
| Late March | Europe moves; North America has already moved |
| Early April | Most of the northern hemisphere is aligned again |
| Late October | Europe moves back before North America |
| Year-round | Much of Asia and the Gulf never moves at all |
A standing call between Europe and Asia shifts by an hour twice a year from the Asian side's point of view, and the European side usually does not notice because their local time is unchanged.
The remedy is to look at the standing arrangements in the two weeks before each change and confirm them explicitly.
Confirming rather than proposing
With a narrow window, proposing costs a round trip and a round trip may cost a day.
I have put 10:00 Hamburg time on Wednesday the 11th in the diary — 13:00 your time. If that does not work, any time between 08:00 and 11:00 here on Wednesday or Thursday suits me equally.
That is one message. It books something, and it supplies the alternatives in the same breath so that a rejection does not cost a second exchange.
Protecting the hour once booked
A narrow overlap is the scarcest thing on the schedule and it is routinely spent badly.
It should not be used for anything that could be read. Status, numbers, documents and plans all travel better in writing and can be absorbed by each party in their own working day. What the hour is for is the things that only work live: disagreement, negotiation, ambiguity, and the questions nobody has written down yet.
If it is missed
Do not rebook immediately into the next available slot without asking why it was missed.
Half the time the answer is that the invitation was read in the wrong zone, which means the next one will be too unless the invitation is fixed. Establishing that costs one line and prevents the same hour being lost twice.
Holding the slot
Where a narrow window exists, the slot inside it is worth defending in both directions.
Internally, that means not letting it be taken by something else. A standing hour that is the only contact point with a supplier should be treated as unmovable in the way a flight is, and the person who owns it should say so to colleagues who try to book over it.
Externally, it means being reliably present. A party at the awkward end of a window who twice finds nobody there will stop treating it as reliable, and the next time something urgent arises they will handle it themselves rather than wait for the slot.
Both of those are about the same thing: a narrow window only works as a mechanism if everybody believes it will happen. Two cancellations are enough to end that belief, and rebuilding it takes months.