Time zones and the shifting midnight

As you travel around the world with an AI-powered time tracker, your midnight shifts. What happens to your timesheet when midnight moves around?

TL;DR: What do you need to know to use Clockk successfully?

• If you’re not planning to use Clockk while you’re away, avoid changing Clockk’s time zone. That way you can keep “your” midnight unchanged.
• If you must use Clockk, try to only access the days since you entered the new time zone.
• If you’re away for a short time, or just doing tiny bits of work while you’re away (a meeting here, an email there), do your timesheets when you get back home.
• If you’re away for a longer period (e.g. “digital nomad”) and you do switch Clockk time zones, be aware of your new and old midnights. Any old time zone days you visit in Clockk while in the new time zone may have their timesheets auto-saved to the “wrong” day.

This is actually a really complicated question. Dealing with a shifting midnight is one of the conceptually hardest problems any AI or Automated time tracker has to deal with. This is how Clockk answers it.

Ordinarily, you live and work in Toronto (America/Toronto). As you work, Clockk is auto-saving your timesheet. One night you skip dinner and work until 1:30 a.m. Clockk will automatically split your time between two days: any block of time started before midnight will be logged to the previous day, and any block of time started after midnight will be logged to the next day. Let’s assume you logged 3 hours of work before 6 p.m., 5 hours of work between 6 p.m. and midnight, and 1 hour of work between midnight and 1:30.

Now you go on a working holiday to Berlin (Europe/Berlin), which is 6 hours earlier. What was midnight in Toronto is now 6 a.m. Berlin time. Your new midnight is 6 p.m. Toronto time.

So far, so good. Everything works because the day where things shifted was probably a travel day and you probably weren’t working on either flight (and let’s not consider if you did because your head might explode).

While you're in Berlin, you review some of your past workdays in Clockk, including the particular day where you worked over midnight in Toronto. Clockk’s auto-save kicks in (it activates whenever you view a particular day in Clockk), and because of your shifting midnight, this happens:

Work you did on one day ”suddenly” ends up on another day. All the hours are still accounted for but they’re now in the “wrong” place.

But there’s a worse scenario where your hours are duplicated or disappear.

Imagine if while in Berlin, you only looked at the second day (the part after midnight Berlin time). The Clockk auto-saver will update your timesheet and report 6 hours that day. Because you never visited the previous day, the Clockk auto-saver never runs and your old reported hours (8) remain. That means you’ve now recorded 5 hours twice. Or, the other way around where you only visit the previous day and you now “lose” 5 hours from your timesheet. The work is still there, it’s just not reported in the timesheets for either day.

This problem exists because Clockk auto-saves your timesheets. In the future, we will add a timesheet review and locking feature. Once a timesheet has been locked, the auto-save will not change it. However, if you manually change and update that day’s timesheet, the problem will surface. This is just a fundamental problem with automated time tracking over midnight.