Our Journey
We are a group of travelling professionals that constantly travel. In the beginning, life was easy, or so we thought. Strap on your watch, a proper GMT watch if you really wanted to be fancy and you were pretty much set. Circadian rhythms something many of us were aware of, however, the tools to manage your rhythms well and properly monitor your personal health data didn't exist. In recent years there has been an explosion in the ability to collect and display health data and to use it to drive real change and improvements in your life. Ironically though, the very group that would benefit the most from this data have the hardest time utilizing it.
We have tried countless time zone trackers, sleep monitors, health trackers, heartrate monitors, and calorie trackers. Some worked better than others and many helped us live happier healthier lives, but they all had one thing in common. Once we were travelling they all lost some or all of their functionality. If there is one thing that constant business travel has taught us, it is that sometimes it pays to not adjust to local time wherever you may be. If you only have one meeting in a country before you travel to the next, it may be worth maintaining as close of a sleep schedule to home as possible and just wake up really early (or stay up really late) for that one meeting.
In that vein, it sometimes made sense to leave our phone in its home time zone instead of switching all over the world. But this creates other problems, scheduling for the days agenda gets messy, knowing when breakfast is available becomes an unnecessary math problem at two in the morning. And we had an epiphany, the tools just didn't exist to properly address all of the problems at hand. Every attempted solution would cause compromises and difficulties in some other area. So we decided to make the tools ourselves. It turns out to be rather simple, you just have to break the mental paradigm of living in one time zone and let go of the assumption that your phone's system should float through time zones just as you do.
Tips for Use
Sleep is King
This is the profile for someone who sees no need to adjust to the time zone where you are at. If you are travelling to lots of countries in a short amount of time and don't have all day meetings, this one could be for you.
- Install Zonal
- Go to General Management > Date and Time > Automatic time zone and toggle it off. Set your home time zone there.
- Put a widget on your homescreen and configure the time zone to Automatic.
- Set your home time zone in the settings on Zonal.
- Add any other time zone widgets you may want to track.
What this does for you:
- Your phone is now anchored to your home time. All of your sleep/exercise/calorie trackers and streaks will have no discontinuities and make perfect sense.
- Your widget now works just like your phone's clock widget would have before Zonal.
- Setting your home time zone in the app allows the app to notify you if and when Android reboots, which always turns automatic time zone back on.
- If most of your calendar events or to-dos are in your home time zone this is priceless. No more reminders on the wrong day, or twelve hours late.
Too Many Meetings Too Much Math
Super simple use case here. The power to set alarms in any time zone is amazing. Are you in LA and need to conference in for the noon meeting in London? Just set an alarm for noon in London, don't worry about the time zone offsets and math. Have numerous meetings in different countries? You can plan them all out and set your alarms even before you leave on the trip. Set alarms in any time zone. Keep your standing weekly alarms in your home time zone, set meeting alarms wherever they are going to be. If you want default alarm behavior like every other app and a floating time zone, just leave the time zone set to automatic for that alarm. True flexibility at your fingertips.
General Disclaimer
Zonal is a general-purpose clock, time zone, and alarm utility. It is not a medical device and is not designed or intended for use in any safety-critical, health-critical, or life-critical context.
Alarm delivery may be affected by factors outside the developer's control, including Android battery optimization (Doze mode), manufacturer-specific power management, Do Not Disturb settings, device restarts, low battery, and operating system updates.
You should not rely on this app as your sole method of tracking important events or obligations. The developer assumes no liability for missed, delayed, or failed alarms or any consequences arising from reliance on this app.
For full terms, see the Terms of Service.