Time and Date: The Reference Desk for Every Question About When

Time and Date is the site you end up on whenever a question involves the word “when.” What time is the call in Auckland? When does the sun set here in November? How many days until the deadline? Does Chile switch to daylight saving before or after we do? It answers all of them, has answered them for decades, and looks like it has never once been redesigned by a committee.

It is deeply unfashionable and completely indispensable.

What is Time and Date?

The site is run from Norway by a small company that has been doing this since the 1990s, and its longevity shows in the best way. It has accumulated coverage the way a good reference library does: thousands of cities in the world clock, holiday calendars for country after country, historical time zone changes, sunrise and sunset tables going back and forward years, eclipse paths, moon phases and seasonal dates.

The core of it is time zones, which are far harder than anyone expects. Time zones are not geography, they are politics. Countries change their offsets. Regions adopt and abandon daylight saving. Northern and southern hemispheres switch in opposite directions, and even within the northern hemisphere the changeover dates do not line up, which produces a few weeks each year when the gap between London and New York is not the number everyone has memorized. Time and Date tracks all of that, and it is why you should never do the arithmetic in your head.

Layered on top of the raw data is a set of genuinely well-designed tools. The Meeting Planner takes several cities and shows a colored grid of which hours are reasonable for everyone, so you can see instantly that there is exactly one civilized overlap between California, Berlin and Singapore. The Event Time Announcer produces a link that renders a fixed moment in each visitor’s own local time, which is the correct way to publicize anything international. The Time Zone Converter does the simple case cleanly.

Then there is the long tail: date calculators that add or subtract business days, countdown timers you can embed, printable calendars for any year and country, a distance calculator, weather, and an astronomy section with eclipse predictions detailed enough to plan travel around.

It is ad-supported and the pages are dense. That density is the point. This is a reference work, not a product experience.

What can you do with Time and Date?

• Check the world clock. Current time in thousands of cities, with the current UTC offset and DST status shown plainly.
• Convert a time between zones. Pick a date, a time and two places, and get the answer with DST already accounted for.
• Plan a meeting across regions. The Meeting Planner grid shows overlapping working hours for multiple cities at once.
• Announce an event properly. Generate a link that shows one fixed moment in each viewer’s own local time.
• Look up sunrise, sunset and twilight. Full tables by location and date, including golden hour and the various definitions of twilight.
• Do date math. Days between two dates, a date a given number of working days from now, week numbers, and age calculations.
• Check holidays anywhere. Public holiday calendars by country and year, which is how you avoid scheduling a launch into a national day off.
• Follow the sky. Moon phases, eclipse predictions with visibility maps, equinoxes, solstices and meteor showers.

Tips to get the most out of it

Use the Meeting Planner instead of converting times one by one. Converting three cities separately is where mistakes happen. The grid shows all of them at once and makes the single workable hour obvious.

Bookmark a personal world clock. You can build a custom list of the cities you actually care about, which turns a general reference site into a one-glance dashboard for your particular team.

Send an Event Time Announcer link, never a raw time. Writing “3pm EST” in an invite guarantees that someone gets it wrong, especially since EST and EDT are different things and most people use the wrong one for half the year.

Check holidays before proposing a date. The other side rarely volunteers that your suggested Tuesday is a national holiday until after you have sent the calendar invite.

Watch the DST gap weeks. For a few weeks each spring and autumn the usual difference between two countries is off by an hour. If your meeting sits near a changeover date, verify it rather than assuming.

Explore the astronomy section for its own sake. The eclipse pages, with maps of where totality falls and how long it lasts, are genuinely good enough to plan a trip around years in advance.

If you like Time and Date, also try…

• World Chat Clock: a faster, more visual way to spot the overlap when you just need a meeting slot.
• wttr.in: the same no-nonsense attitude, applied to weather.
• Omni Calculator: a similarly enormous reference collection, for everything that is not time.
• What Time Is It Right Now: the joke version of the same question, and worth the click.

More scheduling sanity in Productivity, and further reference-grade utilities in Tools & Utilities.