Hi @Tegwyn Stockdale - welcome to the world of timezones in Workfront. We've been through it all because we have resources located all over the world.
What you are seeing happen is that Workfront displays times based on the viewer's PC timezone. It translates the time from whatever was set on the task into the viewer's timezone. This is really the correct way to do it because say you have a task that must be started at 1pm ‚New York time, but someone from Seattle is going to be working on it remotely, then they will see 10am as the start time. If they were presented with 1pm as the start time (as you see it) then they would start the task 3 hours late.
If your situation is that you're located in New York but you're planning a project which is happening in Seattle with Seattle-based resources and you want the task to start at 1pm Seattle time then you need to plan the task to start at 4pm. You need to do these calculations in your head, however another option is to change your PC to Seattle time then refresh the browser (dates will all change) then start editing the tasks using their local time. Just be careful not to make edits on other New York projects at the same time.
@Skye Hansen mentioned Schedules, which is another factor, but it is not playing a part in your examples. All Schedules have a timezone set on them in the admin area. Project Schedules affect the scheduling of tasks based on what the normal working hours are for that timezone. If you're editing a project in another timezone you may see the impact of this by some tasks running late or carrying over to the next business day. If you have a project with Seattle time as the project schedule but you're editing it on your PC using New York time (and not doing the mental calculation of starting times), if you set a 1 day task to start at 9am, this is really 6am Seattle time. The resource will actually not start work on it until 9am Seattle time (12pm New York time) and so the task will finish 3 hours late.
Lastly, another Schedule-related factor is User schedules. Every user has their own schedule and it may be different to the Project Schedule. When a task is first created and has nobody assigned, it uses the Project Schedule. Once a resource is assigned to it, the User Schedule applies. This can cause tasks dates to change. Following the examples above, if you assign a New York-based resource to a task which is scheduled to start at 9am Seattle time, this is actually 12pm New York time, and that resource only has another 4 to 5 working hours remaining for that day. This will cause the task completion date to extend by 3 to 4 hours into the next working day and finish at 12pm New York time (9am Seattle time).
It can cause a bit of confusion until you get used to it, but it all works pretty well and is logical. It also allows a lot of flexibility for managing projects and resources all around the world.
The #1 feature request which I've asked for (but WF have not yet delivered) is an option on the project so the user can choose whether they want to see times converted to their local time, or times as per the Project Schedule. This would avoid you having to mess around with your PC time (which can cause confusion with other open apps such as email).
If any other questions, let me know as we've likely been through it already!
Regards,
