If your company has multiple offices you're probably all too familiar with time zone conversions and horrors. Here's how time zones fit into Donut.

When you add Messages to an Onboarding Journey you'll notice that you choose a day and time for Messages, but not a time zone (or date). This is because Templates can be applied to a new hire with any start date and in any time zone, ensuring that Messages are sent at the right time for every new hire based on their start date and time zone. You can forget about doing any time zone math when you're building flows.

When you add new hires you can set the time zone for each new hire. This ensures that if a Message is scheduled for, say, 1 p.m. then they will actually receive it at 1 p.m. in their local time.

You can update a new hire's time zone at any time — just go to the New Hires page. If you make a change to their time zone once they've already started onboarding then all the remaining Messages will be sent in their new time zone.

Example: Suppose your new hires travel to HQ for their first week and then return to their local office after orientation. You'll want to update their time zone when they go back to their local office.
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Time Zones at the Journey-Level

By default, all Journey messages — including Channel Messages, Cohort Channel Messages, and Cohort Channel Creation — are sent in each participant's local time zone (shown as "local" on the Journey calendar).
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If you want certain messages to always go out at a specific time in one consistent time zone — like your headquarters' time zone — you can set a Journey Time Zone in your Journey settings.
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How to set it:
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What it affects: When a Journey Time Zone is set, the following three message types will be sent at the scheduled time in that selected time zone, regardless of where participants are located:

All other message types (direct messages, tasks, polls, intros, etc.) continue to be sent in each participant's individual local time zone.
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You'll see the time zone reflected in the top-right corner of each message card on the Journey calendar — either "local" or the time zone abbreviation (e.g., HST) for affected message types.
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Donut's Calendar Integration simplifies the hard work of scheduling by automatically finding available time slots between you and your teammates. By default it scans for availability from 9am-6pm in every participant's respective calendar.
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If your team is spread across different geographical areas and timezones, we recommend that folks adjust their own availability, allowing Donut to find times that work best for you! To learn more about setting your working hours, check out this guide. ✨
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If you have any questions or feedback, click the purple Donut button on the bottom right of your screen to open up a chat with our support team!