☀️ Spring | 🍂 Fall Seasonal Clock Changes

Starting 9th of March, our Northern Atlantic clocks start their Spring forward while it's not until April that the Southern Hemisphere takes its Fall back. Strap in, it's going to be a tad confusing.

Starting on the 8th of March, most of the United States, Canada, and a few border regions of Mexico jumped ahead to Daylight Saving time. That “spring forward” can leave the world of international events a little wobbly. Since Projectkin events are scheduled at one of just two time windows, we’ve minimized — but not eliminated — the potential for error. This post gives you a preview of what changes and on what days this season.

There’s a method to the madness.

To synchronize modern clocks, we adopted a system of 24 time zones, each marked in hourly increments relative to the local mean time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, resulting in Greenwich Mean Time (or GMT). By a happy coincidence of geography, California lies on the Western edge of the Americas, so that two natural time slots result.¹

• 🐓 A slot in the California morning that’s friendly to the Atlantic coasts of Europe and convenient across the Americas, for example:

  • 10 am San Francisco, 1 pm Toronto, 6 pm London, 5 am Sydney

• 🫖 A slot in the California afternoon that’s friendly to the Asian and Pacific nations but still convenient across the Americas, for example:

  • 4 pm San Francisco, 1 pm Wellington, 11 am Sydney, 12 am London

That logic led me to schedule Projectkin programs for what I call Atlantic-friendly and Pacific-friendly start times.

Conceptual map showing the logic behind Atlantic- and Pacific-friendly start times for programming and how they’re affected by time changes.

Now Add Seasonal Changes

The trick, of course, is that in the Northern and Southern hemispheres we generally change our clocks to Spring forward and Fall back. If that’s not enough, our varying geography and politics won’t let us agree on a single global date for these changes. Instead, they take place regionally, leaving us scrambling to keep up.

This year, the changes occur in three stages over four weeks, starting on Sunday, March 8. These are the key dates to keep in mind:

March

• First Sunday, 8 Mar: Most of the United States and Canada (except for Hawaii, most of Arizona, and Saskatchewan) jumped ahead an hour at 1 am.

• Last Sunday, 29 Mar: The United Kingdom and most European countries will jump ahead an hour to British Summer Time (BST) or Central European Summer Time (CEST).

April

• First Sunday, 5 Apr: New Zealand and most states in Australia will move their clocks back one hour to Standard Time. As of 2026, three regions in Australia do not change their clocks: Queensland, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory.

Projectkin Events

Projectkin events are scheduled according to North American clocks. To anticipate local start times in your region, you can always check the Projectkin Events calendar, which uses your local clock to calculate start times on any given day. This is very much like online tools like WorldTimeBuddy when used to calculate future events.

Planning for Order

The chart below visualizes the shift in Projectkin event start times in four Anglophone time zones. This season, it’s the four weeks between 8 March and 5 April that can be confusing. That’s not so bad, is it?

Projectkin’s Atlantic and Pacific-friendly start times across four Anglophone time zones.

Your Computer Calculates Start Times

Many don’t realize that their computer, phone, or tablet calculates program start times when viewing the Projectkin Events Calendar. This is done using a third-party service called Tockify.com, which hosts all event pages for Projectkin. To make it easier to see the entire month, tap the full-screen button on the Events Calendar.

Expanded Calendar Views

With the calendar expanded to full screen, you can explore Tockify calendar view options:

• Move forward and backward on the calendar by changing the date.

• Use the Pinboard and Agenda views as alternatives to the Monthly view.

• Pro tip: Use the search window to filter events by title.

Full-screen view for the weeks after March 8, viewed in Pacific time.

Notice that this affects not only my Projectkin events, but also the two monthly gatherings centered on my sister publication, MissionGenealogy. I now maintain this publication as a public service to our growing genealogy community here on Substack. Our March meetings, usually held in the first week of the month, were delayed by RootsTech and will be held today, March 10th or 11th, depending on your location. See a filtered version of this calendar for your local times at MissionGenealogy.org/events.

A clip of the pinboard view from MissionGenealogy.org/events.

Last thoughts

Projectkin is platform independent, and we don’t accept sponsorships or affiliate funds. You can explore past programs at Projectkin.org/event-recordings. You can thank your Patrons, speakers, and community participants by visiting their publications or sharing them with your communities. Share the love ❤️ and join in the conversation.

1. To keep this simple, these GMT calculations are based on times on January 1, 2026.