Jan asks:

Other ways that people tweak time? The relatively common practice of trying to ‘buy time’ by setting one’s watch or alarm clock a few minutes ahead of the actual time; inter-city drivers trying to talk up the time it takes to travel between two points to talk up an all inclusive fare; setting meeting’s ahead of time to account for late arriver’s.

In real life, our office tweaks time by just trying to keep it from jumping unpredictably.

When I travel (monthly), I do not adjust my computer or my cell phone clocks to the new time zone, nor do I allow my devices to automatically update their time settings from the network. If I do, all of my appointments will be out of whack.

When I enter an event into my calendar, I’m usually in Israel (GMT +2). The meeting is at 9.00am? I enter it for 9.00am on my calendar. When I get to Japan (GMT +9), my 9.00am meeting doesn’t show up until 6.00pm… hard to explain to the person you’ve come thousands of miles to meet. So the times stay set on Israeli time, and my friends and family are left to puzzle as best as they can at the oddball hours at which they are hearing from me. (Or not. In the midst of jet lag or work overload, my communication times appear to be perfectly normal when viewed from many timezones away.)

Why not set the appointment for the appropriate time zone in the first place? I’m sure many programs support that feature (as far as I can tell, iCal for Macintosh does not support timezone definitions for events on an event-by-event basis, although that’s hard to believe). But who has time to mess around and find out if the Macintosh solution matches my Nokia phone, or my Blackberry? If something in that loop doesn’t work, and the “synchronization” process ends up unsynchronizing my life… I’m in deep trouble.