ConvertKit sends at 3am if you forget one UTC rule
The café WiFi flickers as you queue tomorrow’s broadcast, double-check the preview, and close the laptop. Twelve hours later your phone lights up with unsubscribe notifications—because your 9am send fired at 3am and woke half your list.
ConvertKit’s UTC offset ignores daylight saving and breaks your send time
The broadcast scheduler uses fixed offsets that don’t shift with the clocks—so your 9am becomes 8am or 10am twice a year.
ConvertKit’s broadcast scheduler asks for your time zone as a UTC offset—UTC-5, UTC+1—not a named region like America/New_York or Europe/London. That distinction matters because offsets are static. When daylight saving begins or ends, your offset stays locked to the value you set months ago, and your carefully chosen 9am send drifts an hour forward or backward without warning.
The fix is manual: twice a year, check your account time zone setting and adjust the offset to match the current local observance. If you’re in a region that observes daylight saving, set a calendar reminder for the Sunday each period begins and ends. Alternatively, schedule all broadcasts in UTC and do the conversion yourself—tedious, but predictable. The post below walks through the mechanic, shows where the setting lives in ConvertKit’s interface, and explains why the platform chose offsets over IANA time zones in the first place.
TACTIC
Your best AI prompts vanish into chat history—here’s how to keep them
Most operators refine a solid prompt over three or four iterations, use it once, then lose it when the chat scrolls off-screen or the session expires. Three months later you’re rebuilding the same logic from scratch because you never versioned the working draft. Prompt versioning doesn’t require tooling—a numbered text file, a Notion database, or a Git repo all work. The key is capturing the prompt, the date, the model, and one line describing what changed. Small discipline, large payoff when you need to replicate results or train a junior operator.
READER QUESTION
When does auto-update break a WordPress plugin in production?
Auto-updates feel efficient until a minor version introduces a fatal error and your site goes blank at 4am. The decision isn’t binary—some plugins ship disciplined releases and test thoroughly; others push breaking changes disguised as patches. A safe rule: enable auto-updates only for plugins maintained by vendors with public changelogs, test environments, and a track record of backward compatibility. For everything else, update manually on staging first and verify forms, checkout flows, and any custom integrations. The linked guide includes a decision tree that maps plugin type to update strategy.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Spam folder placement matters more than open rate ever will
Open rates tell you who clicked “show images” or tapped a link. They don’t tell you how many subscribers never saw your email because it landed in spam. Inbox providers make that decision before open tracking fires, so a 40% open rate might mask a 30% spam-folder rate—and you’d never know unless you check placement directly. Tools like GlockApps and Mail-Tester simulate delivery across major providers and show you where your message actually lands. Run a test every quarter, especially after changing your sending domain, adding new signup forms, or switching ESPs. The underlying mechanic and three-step audit process are linked below.
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