For me, I seem to adjust the best when I arrive mid-morning in Europe, get to the hotel by noon, shower, and then hit the streets until the time I'd usually go to bed at home.

I have determined that I HATE early morning arrivals. The "extra few hours" I get are wasted. I can't begin to tell you how zombied out I can get when I land at 6 AM (which is 1 AM or midnight on my body clock) and then have to fill 12-15 blurry hours before bedtime. I think the last time I did this I was meeting a friend in London.... and knew I was in bad shape when I accompanied her to a museum when it opened and realized I was staring at her finger as she was pointing out details of the artwork and simply not seeing the artwork behind it. I had utterly crashed. I was probably low on sugar to boot.

So much better if I land at 5 AM "on my body clock" (10-11 AM at destination), get to the hotel, shower, and then have 8 hours to go. Ever since I figured this out, the first day has been a breeze. I spend the day wandering, have dinner at 8 PM and lights out at 11 PM. No sweat. As a bonus, the flight home is usually a later flight which means you "get back" those hours on your return day - when you are fresh.

I think that for me, this would result in me being screwed up for a whole week. But if you think it would work, it is worth a try. Worst case scenario is that you are tired for the week before your trip :)

When I fly to Europe, my strategy is to get up early the day of travel and then sleep as much as possible on the plane. Then I treat the day I land in Europe as though it is a regular day where I just didn't get a good night's sleep the night before - a little on the tired side, but ok. I eat well, get some exercise, preferably spend a bunch of time outside. I go to sleep early and usually wake up on day 2 completely adjusted.

I am a firm believer in the sun resetting my clock. If I can spend a good part of the first day in Europe outside and just keep going when I'd prefer to nap, I find the next and future days are normal for me.
Coming home is a totally different situation.....up at 3 AM! Better at home, though, than while traveling.
You'll have a great trip even if you have a few sleepy days!

After about 15 European trips we have settle on a program that for us works very well. And, DebitNM, it follows some of your thoughts. From Denver we need to shift eight hours. I don't think one hour for eight weeks would work because of too many other problems. Hard to be eight hours out of phrase with the rest of the world, We try to time shift about four hours, sometimes only three, starting the previous month and adjusting everything forward about an hour a week including meals, etc. And it doesn't effect works schedule too bad either. On the day prior to departure we shift to European time as best we can. In bed around 6 and up by 1 or 2 AM Denver. If the gym is open we will go to the gym or try for a hard workout in the morning with all the lights on. Depending on departure time we go to the airport pretty early and try to have an evening meal around 3 pm equivalent to 8/9 European time at one of the better restaurants in the airport. Find a quiet relaxing corner of the airport and read, check email, any number of things that we could normal do in the evening prior to sleeping. With an 8 to 9 pm departure we board, take about 30 minutes of settling in, shoes off, eye shades, ear plugs, and try to be a sleep by the time we level off. Ignore all service. When the plane wakes up in the hour prior to landing we freshen up, have whatever is being served for breakfast and land. Will head to the hotel and dump luggage, generally look for nice light lunch, do a fair amount of walking around in the sun, return to the hotel around 3 pm and take a two hour nap with a set alarm clock although we generally wake up after an hour and half or so. Hit the street, have dinner at the normal local time, and in bed by 10 to 11 pm. Up at the normal time the next day with min to slight jet lag effect. And nothing after the second day. It sounds complicated, I know, but it is second nature to us now and works very well for us.

An older thread, but an interesting concept.

DebitNM, did you try any version of this? Curious to know what you decided.

We did. We started about 4 days before trip. Got up 1.5 hours earlier on day one and to bed 1.5 hours earlier that night. Did that each day until we left home. We were able to sleep on the overnight portion of flight and wake up in Copenhagen on their time. Worked pretty well.

We had jet lag on the way home for at least 10 days.

We didn't do this on our last trip and we thought it made a difference. So we will do it again on our trip next spring.

Thanks ~ good to know your experience.