Timezone madness in task management app

Question

I am currently working on a task management application that allows users to create and assign tasks, set start and due dates and track work progress.

In my app users do not plan hours, they just set start and due dates as 10-Oct-2013 - 20-Oct-2013.

The problems happen in case when Reporter (task creator) and Assignee live in a different timezones so at the same time it may be Tuesday for Reporter but still Monday for Assignee. And vice versa.

Obviously there are two ways of dealing with dates:

1. Use server (or account settings) timezone to define current day for all users
2. Use each user’s local timezone to define his current day

But both ways lead to total madness. Just a look at the examples:

The madness of using common timezone for all users:

• Say, it’s Monday morning. Assignee opens his task list. Suddenly he sees that all the tasks with deadline for today are marked as overdue! He believes he has the whole day to finish them, but they are overdue already!
• Also Assignee can see tasks with the start date on Tuesday scheduled for today! That can happen if my timezone is UTC-9 and account’s timezone is UTC+9.
• In other timezone combinations Assignee can see tasks with the start date equal to his today but they are scheduled for tomorrow.

The madness of using each users local time:

• Reporter lives in UTC+9 and Assignee lives in UTC-6. If reporter creates task that should be started immediately (and sets today as start date) then Assignee gets the task scheduled for tomorrow because his local time is still yesterday.
• Say the task start date is 10-Oct. At the same time it’s status will be already “In progress” for Reporter but “Starts tomorrow” for Assignee.
• If Reporter build a report with Assignee’s current tasks then the app will use his local time to define today. But for the Assignee it may be already tomorrow so his current tasks are totally different.

Does this problem have a solution? I tried ideas of converting the dates to each user’s timezone to let different users see the same start date as a different value, but that does not work properly in all cases.

Answer 1

Always record dates and times in UTC especially when working across time zones. Display dates and times in the user's own time zone.

Even when you record everything in UTC, what does "today" mean? Usually people mean it to be somewhere between today at 0:00 and today at 23:59:59. Which immediately has implications for someone in another timezone, even with a time zone difference of a single (or even half) hour, part of that day will be on another date.

So, as you already discovered, you cannot use only the date to record start and due requirements. No matter what time you record it in, the day differs for someone in another time zone.

When I assign today as the start date, what should be recorded is "today at 0:00" in local time" translated to UTC. But much of that day will already be gone when the task is assigned. Which will be all the more so for an assignee in an "earlier" time zone. For tasks assigned a start date in the future, you can use the date plus the time when the business day of the assigner starts. For tasks assigned today as the start date, the current time should be used. (Everything translated to UTC when recorded in the database).

Your application should warn the person assigning a task to someone in a different time zone if that someone's business day is already (or almost) over. You can hardly expect someone to start something "yesterday". It would probably help if you included a timeline in your form indicating the business hours for the assigner and the assignee.