Setting the Time

The Time Set watch face is usually the last watch face in the secondary carousel. It will ask you to set the time and date in a specific order: date first (year, month and day), followed by time zone, and then the time. It does this because Second Movement is time-zone aware: if you select the correct time zone, Second Movement can automatically switch into and out of of daylight savings time, no matter where in the world you are.

Still, to take advantage of this feature, you have to select the right time zone, which may be counterintuitive.

Setting the date is the first step because the local time zone depends on the date. When you reach the Time Set watch face, it will be displaying “Year” or “YR”. Press ALARM to advance the year, or LIGHT to accept the year and move on to the “MO"nth. Same thing: ALARM advances the month, LIGHT moves on to “DA"Y. After moving on from setting the Day, you’ll see a Z at the top of the screen, and a flashing display: “UTC” / “+0:00”. This is the Time Zone setting.

Time Zones in Movement

A time zone consists of two things: the current offset from UTC, and a set of rules for daylight savings time changeovers. We couldn’t put every city on Earth into this screen, so we selected a set of cities that represent every possible set of rules. As you advance through the list, you may see several time zones with the same offset: for example as of this writing, “London” and “Lagos” both show “+1:00”. But you would select “London” if you are in the British Summer Time zone, and “Lagos” if you are in the West Africa Time zone. Selecting “London” ensures that your watch will switch back to GMT when BST ends, whereas selecting “Lagos” will keep you in WAT year-round.

You may not see your exact city in the list, but there should be a zone that matches your rules. Central Standard Time in the USA (which can change to CDT) is covered by “Chcago”, whereas year-round Central Standard Time is covered by “Regina” (Saskatchewan) in Canada. If you were in Omaha, you would select “Chicago”; if you were in Mexico City, you would select “Regina”.

Once you’ve selected your time zone, the rest is easy: press LIGHT to advance to setting the hours, minutes and seconds, and you’re done. Note that pressing ALARM with the seconds selected resets the seconds to 00, and does not affect the current minute. We may change this in the future to match the behavior of the original Casio F-91W.