I’m travelling and my team is still on the old schedule

You land, open your calendar, and every meeting is in the wrong place.

The 09:00 standup is now at 18:00. The 16:00 review is at 01:00. Nothing was rescheduled — you moved, and the calendar dutifully re-expressed everything in your new local time, which is technically correct and practically unusable.

Your calendar did the right thing

Worth saying, because the instinct is to think it broke.

A properly-created event stores an instant plus a zone. When your device changes zone, it re-renders the same instants in your new local time. The meeting did not move; you did.

The events that will be wrong are the ones that stored a fixed offset or had the time typed into the description. Those now disagree with the event itself, and the description is the one people read.

Decide the trip's mode before you land

There are two workable strategies and one that fails.

Stay on home time. For short trips — two or three days — do not adjust at all. Keep your working hours in home terms, accept eating and sleeping at odd local hours, and fly back before the mismatch compounds. Adjusting and re-adjusting inside 48 hours costs more than it saves.

Move to local time. For anything a week or longer, adjust properly and move your recurring commitments. This means genuinely rescheduling things, not attending them at 01:00.

The failure: trying to do both. Keeping every home meeting and working local hours produces an eighteen-hour day and a fortnight of exhaustion. This is what most people do by default.

Triage the calendar before you go

Half an hour before departure saves the whole trip.

Cancel anything you do not need to be in. A trip is good cover for pruning a recurring meeting that was already marginal.

Delegate anything that needs a body but not specifically yours.

Move the few that genuinely need you into whatever overlap exists. If you are nine hours out, that window is narrow and at the edge of one day — pick one slot and put everything in it.

Attend at an unsociable hour only for things that are genuinely worth it. There are usually one or two.

Tell people, in their terms

Post your travel hours in the team's local time, not yours:

"In Singapore next week. I'm reachable 08:00–11:00 your time; after that I'm asleep. Anything urgent, message me and I'll see it first thing your evening."

Expressing it in their numbers is the whole trick. "I'm on SGT" makes them do arithmetic, and they will not.

Set the recurring ones back on return

The most common leftover: meetings moved for a trip that never move back, quietly degrading the schedule for everyone who was accommodating you.

Put a reminder in for your first day home.

Related: Coming back is worse than going out · Working across time zones

Figures on this page are computed from the IANA time zone database. Last generated 2026-08-18.