For several years I directed a missions ministry that sent hundreds of people all over the world on missionary adventures at the same time. Of course, that got rather confusing at times! I created scores of spreadsheets to help manage the flights, trains, buses, and car rides. The tricky part was managing time zones. What happens when something going on in one time zone needs to correspond with something in another time zone? I wish I had World Time Buddyback then!

In true web 2.0 fashion, World Time Buddy lets you interact with the site to add time zones based on their acronym or city name. Once you've selected your zones, you simply move your slider to see how different times will stack up across the globe. We had online tools that helped us compare times. But those were clunky and limited. You could only compare a couple of zones and didn't get to see the full time spectrum for fast analysis. When making decisions about transportation for hundreds of people, speed and accuracy are key! Back then, my spreadsheets trumped any online tool I found. If I were doing it again, I would definitely keep World Time Buddy in my back pocket. The free version only allows for four time zones but that should be plenty for most people. I would have needed the paid version which is just $2.99/mo.

So I'll share this in case there are other missions leaders, pastors, or youth pastors looking for a way to keep their sanity while coordinating adventures across several time zones and keeping it all manageable.