Handling Date and Time in OpenClaw

Managing timestamps across different platforms is often a headache. When you are pulling data from various sources, you usually end up doing mental math to figure out if a message arrived five minutes ago or five hours ago. I find that getting the timezone right from the start saves a lot of debugging time later.

In OpenClaw, the system handles this by defaulting to your host-local time for transport timestamps. It only uses the specific user timezone in the system prompt to keep things predictable.

What You’ll Need

• Access to your OpenClaw configuration file (JSON5).
• Knowledge of your host’s IANA timezone (e.g., America/Chicago).

Quick Start

By default, every inbound message is wrapped in an envelope that looks like this:

[Provider ... 2026-01-05 16:26 PST] message text

If you want to change how these timestamps appear, you can modify the agents.defaults section in your config. Here is how you override the defaults:

{
  agents: {
    defaults: {
      envelopeTimezone: "local", // Options: "utc", "local", "user", or IANA zone
      envelopeTimestamp: "on", // Use "off" to remove absolute time
      envelopeElapsed: "on", // Use "off" to remove "+2m" style suffixes
      userTimezone: "America/Chicago",
      timeFormat: "auto", // Options: "auto", "12", "24"
    },
  },
}

Time in the System Prompt

OpenClaw handles the system prompt differently to protect your prompt caching. Instead of inserting a ticking clock that changes every second, it only includes the time zone:

Time zone: America/Chicago

If your agent needs to know the exact current time, it should use the session_status tool. The status card returned by that tool includes a live timestamp.

Working with Tool Payloads

When you use channel tools like Slack or Discord, OpenClaw preserves the raw provider timestamps. It also adds two normalized fields so you don’t have to parse different formats manually:

1. timestampMs: Epoch milliseconds (UTC).
2. timestampUtc: ISO 8601 UTC string.

Troubleshooting

The time format doesn’t match my OS settings When timeFormat is set to auto, OpenClaw checks your macOS or Windows preferences. This value is cached per process to keep things fast. If you change your OS settings, you might need to restart the process to see the update.

Timestamps in envelopes are confusing If the absolute time isn’t helpful, you can set envelopeTimestamp: "off" and keep envelopeElapsed: "on". This shows you how much time passed since the last message (e.g., +30s) without cluttering the logs with dates.

If you have more specific questions about your setup, check the AI Setup Assistant.

What’s Next

• System Prompt
• Timezones
• Messages