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The business lesson of the camp sci-fi classic, When Worlds Collide, was this sign at the spaceport where the plucky humans were building the ship that was supposed to rescue humanity before the Earth was destroyed: "Waste anything but time. Time is the one thing we do not have."

At the When 2.0 conference, we are discussing the business of time management, in particular the business opportunities for companies to help people manage their time. As has been previously blogged, we were hoping that Google would announce a calendar product today (it's not, which the Google guy just apologized for). Regardless, all I want is a calendar program that understands how to manage time zones when I take my laptop to another location. I don't want everything shifted three hours when I fly to New York--or do I? Mitch Kapor of the Open Software Applications Foundation says his new calendar program will be smart about this (at least smarter than Outlook), and there are a few start-ups that make sense of time zones. Sadly, I'm stuck in Outlook. Hopefully, Outlook 12 will be smarter than the current version.

Until then, my solution is to never let my laptop change time zones. It's always on San Francisco time, no matter where I happen to be. An inelegant solution, but better than having my computer make a hash of my schedule.