International travel and the battle for accurate time

By Tom Mueller

Remember that old Chinese proverb about a man with one watch knowing what time it is; a man with two watches never does?

Traveling across multiple time zones sometimes makes me feel I’m living that proverb – especially since I stopped wearing a wristwatch in favor of modern electronics – Fitbits, iphones and the like. These devices have become my 21st century timekeeping nemesis.

The Fitbit has become my primary timepiece, but like many people today, I also rely on my work phone for the current time. I have a global coverage plan and that phone works in most countries I visit.  I also carry a personal phone, which holds my music library for those long flights overseas and supports me in my daily gym workouts. That phone doesn’t have international coverage and thus remains frozen in my home time zone of US Central Time.

I try and try, but that darn Fitbit will not adjust to any local time zone, even when connected to my iphone and the app is running. There is, allegedly, a manual process for setting the time zone on the Fitbit (I use a ChargeHR), but it generally doesn’t work. I’ve spent many frustrating minutes telling the app to tell my Fitbit to display the local time, only to have its highly advanced intelligent algorithms ignore me. Every once in a while – I can’t explain why – it works.

On my recent trip to India, it worked! The app accepted my inputs and the time adjusted to the local time zone (+10.5 hours from home). Then when I moved on to Oman, the Fitbit wouldn’t reset to that time zone; it remained frozen in India time. I then was carrying three devices, each displaying a different time.

It’s not that big a deal, it just seems to take weeks to break the habit of looking at my wrist for the time – and I did this over and over again because the Fitbit is always there, now boldly displaying the wrong time – instead of digging my phone out of my pocket.

Back in the early 90s when I was traveling frequently to Azerbaijan, my wife gave me a nifty analogue watch that had two clock faces and would track time in two time zones concurrently. I wore that one out over the years. But lately I’ve been missing that analogue solution.

Maybe a pocket watch is the new modern solution to help solve my time travel challenges…