How Online Tutors Handle Different Time Zones

One conversion, made once, at our end

The rule that makes cross-border tutoring workable is simple: the family chooses an hour that suits their evening, in their own clock, and never converts anything again. We do the arithmetic once, write the result into the timetable in Pakistan Standard Time, and send a calendar invitation that carries the time zone rather than a typed hour.

This sounds obvious and is routinely got wrong. A family told the class is at 19:00 has to ask whose 19:00, and if the answer arrives in a message rather than a calendar entry, somebody will convert it in their head at the wrong moment. Every confirmation we send names both local times and the abbreviation for each.

Pakistan never moves, so the drift is always on your side

Pakistan Standard Time is UTC+5 and stays there. The country tried daylight saving briefly in the 2000s and abandoned it. That is genuinely convenient for an institute teaching into fourteen countries, because only one clock in any pair ever changes and we always know which one.

Here is what that leaves for the countries we teach into, given as hours ahead of or behind Pakistan.

• United Kingdom: 5 hours behind from late October, 4 hours behind from late March
• United States: 10 hours behind on the east coast in winter and 9 in summer, 13 and 12 on the west coast
• Canada: the same dates as the United States, from about 8 hours behind in the Atlantic provinces to 13 on the Pacific coast
• Australia: Sydney and Melbourne 5 hours ahead, 6 during their summer time from October to April; Perth 3 hours ahead all year
• The Gulf: 1 hour behind in the UAE and Oman, 2 in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, fixed all year
• Malaysia and Singapore 3 hours ahead all year; South Africa 3 hours behind all year

Different countries take different ends of the same day

Our weekday block runs 14:00–22:00 Pakistan time, and where a family lands inside it is decided entirely by their offset. Gulf families get the whole thing and can pick freely. British families get the last ninety minutes, which is why UK slots at the end of the day are the first to fill.

Australian families take the mirror image: the start of our day, not the end. A 14:00 class in Lahore is 19:00 in Sydney on standard time, an ordinary school-night hour, while a 20:00 class in Lahore is one in the morning there. American families sit outside the block altogether, and are handled by opening a separate early-morning slot rather than by stretching the evening.

The mistake is the day, not the hour

When the gap is large enough that the class crosses midnight, the two sides name the lesson differently and both are right. A class at 06:00 on Tuesday in Pakistan is 20:00 on Monday in New York. The family writes Monday in the diary. The tutor writes Tuesday. Nothing goes wrong until somebody says next Monday and means a different day from the person they are speaking to.

The convention that fixes it is to name the date on both sides in every message, without exception, even when it feels laboured. Almost every missed lesson we have had with a North American family has been a date error rather than a time error.

The two weeks a year that need a message

In the fortnight around each clock change we write to every affected family, restating both local times as they will be from the following week. We hold the student's local hour where the timetable allows it and move the tutor instead, because the child's routine is the fixed thing and the tutor's is not.

Occasionally holding it is not possible. A UK family on the last slot of our summer day, 18:00 British Summer Time, finds that the same hour in October is 23:00 in Pakistan, past the end of our teaching day. That family moves to 17:00 rather than losing the class. Being told two weeks early is the difference between a decision and a missed lesson.