Scheduled Tasks issue (about timezone, chat windows, rrule setting......) on New ChatGPT Desktop app — works correctly on Web

ChatGPT Bugs
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1

Say it first… I have to use ChatGPT to help me arrange this topic… Quite complex:(((

I found what seems to be a timezone-related issue with Scheduled Tasks in the ChatGPT Desktop app on Windows.

The interesting part is that the same task works correctly on the Web version, so it looks like the issue might be related to the Desktop client rather than the scheduling backend.

Expected behavior

I created a scheduled task:

  • Task: “Workday Journal”
  • Schedule: Monday–Friday
  • Time: 10:00 AM
  • Timezone: Asia/Shanghai (UTC+8)
  • Be set for CHAT

Expected:

The task should run and display at 10:00 AM local time.

Actual behavior (Desktop app)

In the ChatGPT Desktop app, the scheduled task time is displayed incorrectly.

Instead of:

10:00 AM

it shows something around:

03:07 AM

The strange thing is that the displayed time seems related to the task creation time rather than the configured schedule time. And the task creation time:

11:07 AM

Considering my location, it seems easily to remaind of timezone.

Investigation

I tried several things:

  1. Editing the RRULE configuration manually.
  2. Creating a new scheduled task.
  3. Checking the task while paused/unpaused.
  4. Comparing Web and Desktop behavior.

Results:

  • :white_check_mark: Web version displays the correct schedule.

  • :cross_mark: Desktop app displays the incorrect time.

  • :white_check_mark: The task itself appears to be created successfully.

  • :cross_mark: The Desktop client seems to misinterpret or display the timezone information.

  • :cross_mark: The RRULE setting will break down in Desktop version, if I wanna reset it.

    image

    image

Possible cause

My guess is that somewhere in the Desktop client:

  • timezone information may be dropped during parsing, or
  • an ISO datetime without timezone information may be interpreted as UTC.

For example:

2026-08-07T10:00

could be interpreted differently from:

2026-08-07T10:00+08:00

or:

2026-08-07T02:00Z

Environment

  • OS: Windows
  • Client: ChatGPT Desktop App
  • Timezone: Asia/Shanghai (UTC+8)

Additional observation

This is actually a great feature, and I really like the direction of Scheduled Tasks.

However, because AI assistants are increasingly becoming part of personal workflows, cross-platform consistency becomes very important.

Users may trust that:

“10 AM means 10 AM everywhere.”

So timezone handling across Web/Desktop/Mobile experiences is especially important.

Thanks for looking into this!

2

You are welcome to discuss Codex issues here. However, the official place to report and track them is the OpenAI Codex GitHub issue tracker.

I asked ChatGPT to look for the closest related issue, and it identified:

If that issue matches your problem, consider adding a :+1: reaction on the GitHub issue itself—not only on this forum topic. Reactions on GitHub can help the developers gauge the number of affected users.

If it does not describe the same problem, search the existing Codex issues for a closer match. If you cannot find one, open a new issue and include as much relevant detail as possible.