As I am getting ready to go to SXSW and thus to a different timezone I thought I would share how I handle timezones and calendaring (this was in part prompted by a tweet from Andrew Parker the other day about this issue). 

My system is very simple: I put everything into the calendar at the exact time it will occur in whatever timezone I will be in that day.  So if an event is in Austin at 2pm, I will put it into my calendar as 2pm.  When I will get to Austin tomorrow, I will change my phone’s date/time from network to manual and adjust it by 1 hour.  I always leave the phone’s timezone itself on Eastern as that’s where I spend most of my time. 

The reason for this approach is that whenever I have tried to actually use timezones it has resulted in spectacular scheduling fails due to the software (on the phone or in the cloud) trying to do some “magic” to get everything into the right place.  After a couple of missed meetings I stopped trying and moved to my current system.

Would love to hear if anyone has gotten timezones to work properly for them and if so on what combination of phone, local app and cloud sync.