When collaborating with overseas organizations, you need to always consider time differences and changes in daylight saving time.

Conducting research in Australia, the time changed, but only in some states. We were in Queensland, which does not observe daylight saving, but we had to deal with changing time differences between states. The same is true in the United States, where Arizona (except for the Navajo Nation) and Hawaii do not have daylight saving time.

Most smartphones automatically switch to the local time when you go overseas, significantly reducing the likelihood of time-related mishaps disrupting your activities. However, when scheduling online meetings from Japan with overseas partners, you should bear time differences in mind. Meeting tools such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams have time zone setting functions, so when you invite someone to an online meeting in Japan Standard Time, the invitation will be automatically converted to the invitee’s local time zone. This means that when the meeting organizer miscalculates, invitees are more likely to notice.