I travel quite a bit on business and schedule events relative to my local timezone, even if it’s a meeting or appointment I’ll end up doing in a different city and different time zone. Which totally messes me up! I schedule a 6pm dinner for 6pm local time while in my office in Chicago, then when I get to San Francisco and look at my appointments, it’s shown as a 4pm appointment. AUGH! How can I fix this?
Oh, brother, do I know your pain. It’s a dilemma because your iPhone and every other calendar tool — including Mac OS X and its iCal program, your iPad, and even exported calendar events to Google Calendar (gcal) — is trying to be smart and automatically shift things so that your events are always relative to the local time, not your home time. Which is, well, wrong.
I have the same sort of thing: I live in Colorado and have spent the last few weeks scheduling appointments and meetings for during the Consumer Electronics Show this week. But CES is in Las Vegas, which puts it in Pacific Time, even though my home timezone is Mountain. The result? I check my calendar while I’m in Vegas and everything is off an hour. Incredibly not good.
The secret to fixing it is to enable something called “timezone support”. You can set this up on your iCal program (see here: Lock down your iCal timezone) which is a good start, since checking your calendar on your computer will have the same shifting event time problem, but for iOS devices like the Apple iPhone, you need to tweak things a bit differently.
Here’s the problem. When I look at my schedule for today, here’s what I see:
The all-day events are fine, but everything else, every single event, is an hour too early because the calendar’s trying to be smart and say “you set it to 4:30pm when you were in MST, which I know is really 3:30pm PST, so let me just shift it since you’re now in PST”. You can see that with my appointment at Vizio. It’s not at 3.30pm Vegas time, it’s at 4:30pm.
To fix it, I’ll need to switch to “Settings” and look for “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”:
You’ll have to swipe down a bit to find it, as shown above. Then tap on it and swipe down until you find the Calendars section of the settings:
The key change here is “Time Zone Support”. Tap on it to enable it, and…
Use your finger to drag the switch and enable Time Zone Support, then tap the lower option to pick out your “home” timezone, the one you use when you’re entering events. For me, it’s Denver, CO:
That’s the fix. Now when I look at my calendar, it’s locked onto MST and everything is at the time I desire:
Do realize that if you go to enter events while you’re in a different time zone, your calendar app, whether it’s iCal on your computer or Calendar app while you’re on your iPhone, will default to the home time zone time. In other words, if I am in Vegas and enter a dinner meeting for 6:00pm, the program will assume I mean 6:00pm home time zone (Denver) time. Then I’ll see it as a 7:00pm dinner meeting. Wrong, and a tricky problem if you’re moving around a lot. Be aware, experiment, and learn to work with as best you can. It’s a pretty tough problem to manage, I think.
Scheduling events for an European trip with IOS8 is a nightmare. With IOS 7 it was possible to set a time zone for individual calendar events. WHY has this been removed in IOS8??>?
Pretty good instructions. One thing I did find is that under iOS 7 is that you may need to full restart your iPhone. This was tested with an iPhone 4s and iTS 7.1
It would be nice if it wouldn’t change your appointments as you cross time zones unless you specifically set it up to change.
On my old iPhone 4S you could enter a time zone manually for every event, and it was really quick and easy (like on Outlook on my laptop, which my iPhone synchs with) but for some reason Apple did away with this functionality (or replaced it with somnething way too clever).
Previously if you wanted to over-ride the iPhone’s default time zone for a new event (always the one you were in currently) it took a second, as there was a scroll-down menu of time zones in the calendar itself. Now it seems you can still do this, but you have to dig through about 5 menus in settings. For someone like me, who travels all the time, this is a disaster!
Has anyone found a solution to this? Anyone agree there’s a problem? Can we try to get Apple to address it?…
This is still an option, Peter. Just verified it myself. Go into Settings -> Mail, Contacts & Calendar, scroll down to the Calendar section and enable Timezone Support.
Just got back to my home in central Illinois after visiting my inlaws in Virginia. Had my iphone with me on the trip and, not surprisingly, it switched to Eastern Time during my visit. Upon returning home, I noticed ALL of my events in my calendar were showing up exactly one hour earlier.
I followed your instructions: went in and turned on TIme Zone Support with Chicago showing as the location, but there is no change to any of the events in my calendar.
Is there something else I need to do, or do I have to manually change every event in my phone back to the correct time?
Help!!
So you’re saying that all your existing scheduled events shifted an hour, Rhys? Did you turn OFF timezone support in iCal now that you’re home?
I’ve read about this until I can’t anymore, and it’s no clearer. Why don’t Apple et al simply let us specify the time zone of an event when entering it and leave it at that? Local time would be the default choice unless we specify another via Settings. Since a device’s clock will update upon arrival in any time zone, events (and associated alerts) will show at their correct times; done. Events timed to oneself personally (getting up, taking meds, etc.) could be specified as having no time zone. Not difficult.
We learn to use functions through trial and error, but time zone support is about air travel, which makes learning from errors particularly burdensome: Generally speaking, business travelers can’t afford screwups, while infrequent travelers can’t get enough practice using the feature.