The Activity app on the Apple Watch encourages you to be more active by using circles. If you stand and move around during 12 or more different hours during the day, you complete the blue "Stand" circle. If you exercise for 30 minutes or more during the day, you complete the green "Exercise" circle. And if you move around and burn enough active calories to meet that goal (which can be adjusted), you complete the red "Move" circle. Complete all three before midnight, and you get an alert congratulating you for completing all of your goals that day. Complete all of your goals every day in a week, and your watch congratulates you on that. Completing circles gives you positive reinforcement for being more active every day, and I know that for many people, this encourages them to be more physically active. It has for me.
The only problem is that I typically workout late at night. I'm not a fan of early mornings, I'm too busy at work during the day to go to a gym in the 9 to 5 hours, I spend time with my family at night, and after reading stories and putting my kids to bed, finishing up my work from the day, writing posts for iPhone J.D., etc., it is often 11pm before I have time to use my treadmill. That's usually still enough time to exercise and complete my circles for the day, unless I'm really busy and find that it is close to midnight before I can exercise. But the Apple Watch only gives you credit for work done before midnight, so if you start exercising at 11:45pm on Tuesday night and finish at 12:15am Wednesday morning, your Apple Watch only assigns 15 minutes of activity credit to Tuesday, which may not be enough to complete your circles for that day. This is frustrating because I consider any time before I go to sleep to be the end of the day on Tuesday, even if it is technically Wednesday morning.
Fortunately, I've found that there is a solution for those of us who exercise late at night. Before midnight comes, on your iPhone, go to General -> Date & Time. You probably have your iPhone configured to Automatically set the time. Turn that off, and manually select a time zone.
I live in New Orleans, which is in the Central Time Zone, so when I see that it is getting late I just tell my iPhone that I am in Cupertino, which is two hours earlier. Within just a few seconds, the time on my Apple Watch automatically adjusts to two hours earlier. And with this extra time at the end of the day, I can easily both start and finish my workout before my Apple Watch believes that it is midnight.
When you are finished with your workout, you may be tempted to change the time zone back to normal. Don't do so yet, because if you do, your Apple Watch will immediately adjust your activity circles to reflect that some activity was before midnight on one day and the rest of the activity was on the second day. Instead, my tests show that you need to wait until it is past midnight in the time zone that you manually selected. You can then adjust the time accordingly. I usually just wait until the next morning to return to the real time zone. Keep in mind that if you are using your iPhone or Apple Watch as an alarm clock in the morning, you'll need to account for the time zone change when you set the alarm.
Hopefully you won't need to use this trick very often because it is confusing to have to change the time zone back in the morning. I myself have only had to resort to this trick a few times over the past few months. But if you exercise late at night and your goal is to complete your circles for one day even though the clock reflects that it is technically the next day, this trick will let you get the activity circle credit as you intended, and will ensure that the Activity app on the iPhone gives you all of the completed circles that you intended to earn.
