Schedules and time zones

You give schedules in plain words. Claude turns them into a cron schedule in a time zone, and Paperclip runs the job at those times.

Your time zone

The setup page saves your browser’s time zone the first time you open it (step 4. Time zone). From then on:

• new jobs use it, unless you name another zone;
• the jobs script shows every time in it;
• CloudCLI’s terminals use it.

To change it, open /setup, type another zone in step 4 and press Save. Use an IANA name, such as America/Toronto, Europe/Paris or Asia/Tokyo.

Changing your zone doesn’t move existing jobs. Each job keeps the zone it was created with.

A job in another zone

Name the zone when you ask: “every weekday at 9:00 London time”. Claude passes it to the job (--tz Europe/London). The job then runs at 9:00 in London, whatever your own zone.

Reading a schedule

Schedules are 5-field cron: minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week.

Schedule	Means
0 8 * * 1-5	8:00, Monday to Friday
30 7 * * *	7:30, every day
0 9 * * 1	9:00, every Monday
0 6 1 * *	6:00, on the 1st of each month
0 */4 * * *	Every 4 hours, on the hour

You never need to write one: say the time in words and Claude sets it. To check a job’s schedule, ask “which jobs do I have?”. The list shows each job’s schedule and zone, and its next run.

Change a schedule

Ask Claude: “move the digest to 9:00”. It changes the schedule, records the change in .claude/jobs.json and pushes it. See Change, pause or archive.

A job without a schedule

A job can also have no schedule and run only when you ask (“run the digest now”). The list shows it as “run by hand only”.

When the server was down

Runs missed while the server was down are skipped, not replayed. The job runs again at its next time. See No overlap, no backlog.

The server’s clock

The deploy form’s TZ variable (default UTC) sets the containers’ clocks and is the default zone until you choose one on the setup page. Leave it as is: the setup page’s zone takes over for jobs, and each job carries its own zone anyway.