How to send Trello updates across time zones

Say you work from Prague and your client sits in New York, six hours behind. When you finish an update at the end of your day, it's lunchtime for them. Write to someone in Asia in the evening and they're asleep, so your comment ends up at the bottom of a pile of overnight notifications by the time they wake up. A few habits fix most of this.

Send it when their day starts

Timing matters most. A comment that lands at 9:00 in the reader's morning gets read with coffee, before the day fills up. The same comment sent at 2:00 their time competes with everything else that arrived overnight.

To work out the time, look at the person's working hours and convert their 9:00 to your time zone. For New York from Prague that's usually 15:00, but Europe and the US switch to and from daylight saving time on different dates, so for a few weeks in spring and autumn the gap is five hours instead of six. A world clock on your phone saves you from getting that wrong.

In Trello you can then schedule the comment for that time. With PrimeScheduler (I built it) you pick the time in your own time zone and the comment is posted at that moment for everyone. There are three other ways to do it, including a scheduled email to the card, in How to schedule a comment in Trello.

Write updates that make sense on their own

When someone reads your update eight hours after you wrote it, they can't ask a quick question and get an answer. Everything they need has to be in the comment.

• Say what changed, what you need from them and by when. "Please review the homepage copy by Thursday 12:00 your time" leaves nothing to guess.
• Avoid "today", "tomorrow" and "tonight". They mean different days for you and for the reader, and they're wrong anyway by the time the comment is read.
• Link or attach what they need. Point to the file, the card or the checklist instead of "the doc we talked about".
• @mention the person who has to act, so the comment becomes a notification and doesn't depend on them checking the card.

Due dates and time zones

Trello shows due dates in each person's local time, which is usually what you want. You set "Friday 17:00" in Prague and your colleague in New York sees Friday 11:00. Where it goes wrong is "end of day" deadlines. If you mean the end of their day, set the due time to their 17:00, not yours. If it really is your end of day, say so in the card.

An example

Say you finish a round of changes for a client at about 21:00 Prague time. Their project manager is in New York, where it's 15:00 and close to the end of her day. Instead of posting right away, schedule the comment for 15:00 your time the next day, which is 9:00 for her:

"@Sarah the second round of homepage changes is on the card, along with the updated pricing table. Could you review both by Thursday 12:00 your time? Two open questions are in the checklist."

She sees it first thing in the morning, with everything she needs to answer, instead of finding it under the evening's notifications or the next day.