Timezone and Travel

Question

Does anyone have suggestions to make due date/time work more smoothly with travel?  I have a board where I've set some dates and times for the local timezone where I live to plan our trip.  When I get to the destination, in a different timezone, I'd like for my phone to use local time but I'd LOVE for my Trello due date/time to "stick" to the original values and NOT adjust as it throws everything off, sometimes to the next day depending upon how far that we are traveling.  Has anyone come up with a solution to this?  A due date "lock" of sorts?  I'd love any suggestions if anyone else has conquered this.  The only thing I've been able to come up with is to export to Excel and save the lines with dates to my One Drive or Google Drive to translate.  Thank you!

Kim Korton · Answer

I actually have the same question because I’ve run into this exact issue while traveling. I set up all my deadlines in Trello based on my home timezone, and everything looks perfect before I leave. But as soon as I land somewhere with a different timezone and my phone updates automatically, all the due dates shift. Sometimes they even move to the next day, which completely throws off my trip schedule and makes it confusing to track what’s actually due when. I’ve been hoping there’s some kind of “due date lock” feature that keeps the original time regardless of timezone changes, but I haven’t found one yet. It’s especially stressful when you’re coordinating tight plans, like airport pickups or a pre-booked makkah to jeddah taxi service, where timing really matters and even a small shift can cause unnecessary confusion. You can check more about it here https://vipumrahtaxi.com/makkah-to-jeddah-taxi/. Like you, I’ve considered exporting everything to Excel or storing a static version in the cloud just to avoid the shifting times. It feels like there should be a cleaner solution, so I’d also love to hear if anyone has figured out a better workaround.

Sergioooo · Answer

Hi Tracy,
This timezone issue happens to a lot of travelers — Trello automatically adjusts due dates based on your phone’s local timezone, so when you land in a different region everything shifts, sometimes by several hours or even to the next day. Sadly, Trello doesn’t offer a built-in “timezone lock.”

What’s worked for us during trip planning is using a text-based date field instead of Trello’s date picker for anything that must stay fixed. Trello won’t auto-convert text, so the original date/time stays intact no matter where you travel. We started doing this while planning routes on our main page here:
https://torontopearsonairporttaxi.ca/

For multi-city trips — especally cross-border routes like Buffalo — using text fields helped keep schedules stable when switching time zones. Here’s our Buffalo page where we had to deal with the same issue:

https://torontopearsonairporttaxi.ca/peterborough-airport-taxi/

If you don’t want to use text fields, the only other workaround is turning off automatic timezone updates on your phone, but that affects all your apps, so most people avoid it.

Hope this makes your travel planning a bit smoother! ✈️🌍

Mike - Dreamsuite Consulting · Answer

Hi,

I am forever moving timezones and I have been caught out, in particularly on a board I have for birthdays and anniversaries.  I set it up while in Asia, so when I return to the UK, the birthdays are on the wrong day...🤦‍♂️

The time for both PC and Mobile will be aligned to the system time of the device.  There is no way of manually overriding it...

You could keep your phone time set to your local timezone and use dual clock to set the local time...This isn't the most ideal but its all I have right now.

You could have a complicated system that has 2 boards "Home" and "Away".  It uses automation to copy cards to another board and then shift the time to a specific timezone, it involves some quite heavy automation and use of custom fields to shift the time.  This would be a fair bit of work to set up but I think it would do the job...