We consider a family of variational time discretizations that are generalizations of discontinuous Galerkin (dG) and continuous Galerkin–Petrov (cGP) methods. The family is characterized by two parameters. One describes the polynomial ansatz order while the other one is associated with the global smoothness that is ensured by higher order collocation conditions at both ends of the subintervals. Applied to Dahlquist’s stability problem, the presented methods provide the same stability properties as dG or cGP methods. Provided that suitable quadrature rules of Hermite type are used to evaluate the integrals in the variational conditions, the variational time discretization methods are connected to special collocation methods. For this case, we present error estimates, numerical experiments, and a computationally cheap postprocessing that allows to increase both the accuracy and the global smoothness by one order.