You're a software engineer living in Idaho. You wake up with the sun at 2PM, Greenwich Mean Time, which everyone just calls "UN Time" since the United Nations adopted it as the universal time standard a few years ago. Soon nobody will call it anything. That'll just be what time it is. Regardless of whether you're in Idaho, DC, Ireland, Nepal or New Zealand, all the clocks will say 2:00 PM at the same time.
You've got a meeting with your distributed team at 3PM. It was originally at 4PM, but Rajit had to reschedule because of a family conflict. Rescheduling was easy. He proposed that the meeting take place at 3PM and everybody knew what that meant without having to ask what timezone he's in and Google the conversion.
How did Rajit know that 3PM wasn't the middle of the night for some of you? Wrong question. Marie prefers to work nights, and Antonia works one night a week. But how did Rajit know that everyone would be up at 3? Easy. He may have used Outlook's scheduling helper, which shows the blocks of time people are available. Or he may have looked at your company profile, which says "3P11P" next to your job title, meaning you work from 3PM to 11PM. Those five characters replace a heap of complicated timezone conversions, conversations, and mistakes.
The entire company loves UN time. When they make travel schedules, they don't have to head-scratch over time lost or gained on flights. People are rarely late to meetings and interviews. Your engineering team takes Fridays off because UN time saves them so much effort, not having to code around 37 different time zones any more. Servers run faster and throw less errors. Not a single ampere of electricity is lost to timezone math. You don't have to teach junior developers about "offsets" or how to use the timestamp with time zone type in Postgres.
You can't remember the last time you drove across the border from California to Arizona and suddenly realized you'd have to skip dinner if you wanted to make your hotel check-in time.
Although people were resistant to the change at first, everyone agrees it's much simpler. It only took a few weeks for people to adapt. It turns out that terms like "morning" and "evening" were based on the position of the sun, not the hour hand of the clock, all along. Gone are the days where everyone spent their entire life farming in a small town, interacting only with the two or three hundred people who lived around them, setting their schedule based on the sun's available light. The Internet has made us all travelers. Ending the tired math of time zones was a simple way to give us more in common with each other.
Someday you'll tell your kids about time zones and they'll squint at you in disbelief. How could people have been so strange? Did they really think that when you flew from Hong Kong to Ireland, you changed your location in space and time? Did people on international calls tell each other what the future held?
The only minor inconvenience is that when you travel a long distance East or West, sometimes you have to look up what business hours are in your new location. Again, it's a short code, like "1A9A": 1 AM to 9 AM. Easy to remember. And come to think of it, you had to do that anyway back when time zones existed, because a lot of places didn't keep standard hours.
Nobody uses Daylight Savings Time anymore, of course. Daylight Savings Time is trash.
The terms "noon" and "midnight" have become misnomers, but nobody minds; language is full of misnomers anyway. "Peanuts" aren't nuts and "strawberries" aren't berries, so nobody's tripped up by the fact that "midnight" isn't the middle of the night. I mean, I guess it is if you're in London.
When the UN resolution was originally passed, there were a few dissenting votes by scholars who held that books written prior to UN Time would become unreadable if a universal standard was adopted. Take the following paragraph, for example:
Steadman jolted awake as the phone rang. He swore and picked it up. "It's 3 AM. This better be good," he growled.
To an audience raised on UN Time, it might seem like a bit of nuance is lost. Just how inappropriate is it to call someone at 3 AM? So a clause was added to the resolution encouraging elementary schools to teach kids one short code of historical significance: 7A7P, a fair estimation of average daylight hours in historical books. You don't have to teach them that summer days are longer and winter days are shorter. That's still true.
Nothing has really changed, except that everyone can agree on what time it is, and everyone wastes a bit less energy figuring out what 3PM means to them, their long-distance significant other, their friend in another country, or their coworker on a distributed team.
Oh, and everyone speaks Spanish now. Once we got time zones figured out, a universal language wasn't far behind.
Top comments (41)
I always thought timezones are unnecessary in a globally connected world and are more like a waste of time and energy, it would be amazing to just have a global timezone so you don't need to think about that.
Remove the AM/PM and use 24 hours clock and is even greater, AM/PM are tied to the concept of noon, if that is removed and we all use a clock not tied to the moment of the day you are, you wake up at the 15:00 hours and go to bed at 7:00 so you sleep 8 hours.
global timezone is GMT or UTC, isn't it?
UTC, GMT has daylight savings.
UTC FTW! :D
Baby steps, Sergio, the world isn't ready for a visionary like yourself yet 😉
But everyone still uses AM and PM suffixes? I don't like this reality! If we're going to change it to one time system, let's use the 24-hour clock (if we have to stick to 24-hour days anyway)
11A7P becomes 11Q191. Suddenly we don't have to think about duplicates. Did Fred say 10PM or 10AM? I brought the merchandise, but did I miss the exchange? How will I get my kidnapped dog back now?
Why Q? Why not. ↩
My eyes almost filled with tears imagining how easier my life could get with such a subtle change.
Well... I'm fine with change and I guess it makes sense. (As a developer no time zones is great of course). But the reality is you're just shifting one abstraction for another. As in, time zones help the world share a standard schedule already. Breakfast time, dinner time for example are relatively the same everywhere. So while there is some maths in figuring out hours lost or gained flying to another locale, it's nice to know those numbers on the clock kinda mean the same thing for everyone. Why does it have to be one or the other? Why not universal time for business and computer logic and local time for local, real world humans living life. (oh wait... it's already like that.)
P.S.- I can easily imagine a world that adopted the change you believe in. And after 100+ years, a country or nation re-implements local time zones and somebody writes a passionate article explaining why local time zones should be brought back as a standard for the rest of the world...
What it would do, in my mind, is trade two questions for one.
With time zones:
Without time zones:
As far as reimplementing time zones, I doubt that would happen. In a globally connected world it doesn't make sense to have people on 37 different schedules. That system evolved in a world where people were mostly isolated based on geographical location; communication and travel took multiple days. Now, you can fly across three time zones in as many hours, and communicate with an opposing time zone instantaneously. Without the precedent of time zones I don't believe they would occur to anyone.
Yes, your article already stated that.
My main point
I just don't feel like it has to be one OR the other.
I work in globally distributed teams, and there is even confusion with those of us in the US because we're spread across Pacific, Central, and Eastern time zones.
However, this solves a problem that does not exist for the vast majority of people on the Earth. Most people don't work in globally distributed teams, most people are not software engineers (and I'm the Ops in DevOps for a consultancy). It would make our jobs somewhat easier, but I don't find it difficult to track multiple time zones.
We have GMT complications for mechanical watches, smart watches do it even more easily. We have an array of websites to use. This is too disruptive for anyone who isn't working in a distributed team, i.e. most of the people on this planet.
I think it's an interesting thought, but since everyone already speaks English if they work "globally" ... do we need to change that, too? ;)
Hmm...do you think the future holds more distributed teams and global relationships, or less?
It's a complex question, for sure. I earn a living by automating processes, so obviously I'm not against that. But is it not just as easy to use UTC to coordinate meeting times? That takes one calculation, no matter where you are on Earth.
Non-technical jobs aren't going away any time soon, and yes, we could argue that "so what does it matter what time it is for them anyway?" The average person isn't going to go for that argument, though.
While I don't consider time zones to be "cultural," language most certainly is. We already lose too many native languages spoken by small groups of indigenous people all over the globe. While I completely agree with your analysis of English as "a complete mess," it's the global standard already with 1.121 billion speakers (according to Wikipedia). By that chart, there would be solid arguments for all of us learning Hindi or Mandarin Chinese instead.
So, I will reiterate my stance that, while this is an interesting thought and it's fun to discuss ... I doubt it's ever going to happen (at least not in our lifetimes).
Dude, Isaac! Not two months ago I was talking with a friend about a global universal time; where you listening in?
To take the idea a bit further: Metric time.
1 second * 10 = 1 deca-second *10 = ....= 1 metric hour.
10 metric hours = 1 metric day
and do on.
Currently the second is based off an atomic clock, so the clock would have to change. Calendar changing is not unheard of; thought now we would have nearly 70 years of software systems to phase out. Not a small feet.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardate ;-)
The thing that pisses me off the most is that, whenever you are going to use Timestemp, the damn language/env/donno defaults it to freaking culture time! Goddamm, default it to UTC! I will change the time zone if I want!!!!
Anyway, since we are taking down this path, I'd prefer double-digit notations and 24hour setting. You know, that way it defaults the way you parse it.
And actualy I really like @moopet to put a letter between, though I'd prefer al so that it translates to to (in from ... TO) in esperanto (you know, universal language and stuff).
So in the end we'd have something like: 09al15 for time ranges.
yeah, I'm happy with this now ahah
ALSO, almost forgot it, WE ALL COULD USE THE HOLOCENE CALENDAR PROPOSED BY THIS AWESOME GUY Cesare Emiliani
As a dev, I like the idea.
But you still have time "zones" and many don't neatly align with hours. e.g. in Australia, the eastern states are 30 mins ahead of the central states and 2 hours ahead of the west.
So, if I went from Melbourne to Adelaide, I'd need to know that everything is 1/2 hour out of sync to what I'm used to. So, although my watch would say the same time, the onus is on me to remember the 30 min difference and its affects.
The idea obviously makes it much easier us devs, but for travellers I'm not so sure.
And at least in the daytime we'd have the sun to give us a sense of what period in the day it is. But at night... landing at 13:00/1PM in Melbourne, without researching, would you know if it's time to go to bed, or nearly time to get up?
Why make every single traveller research that when the current system, knowing that it's 10PM, makes that immediately clear?
So, in the end, I think people would baulk at this idea as it puts the onus on them to research about local times when travelling, instead of the current universal time system where 22:00/10PM is night time where ever you are, and 12:00 is lunch time.
I think the half-hour and quarter-hour time zones ideally would die out.
Yes, it would make traveling a little more difficult. Airports and train stations, and maybe even "Welcome to Quebec" signs, would post business hour short codes to help travelers get oriented.
Still, travel is harder. And communication is easier. Personally I do more of the latter.
Fuck it. Let’s just all use UNIX time stamps 😂😂. Jokes aside, great read!
How about Unix hours / days? :)
... theres nothing stopping us telling people what our working hours are using UTC now.
Add to your email sig: Working hours 1030Z530 (thats me, 7:30am - 3:30pm Brisbane time...) and you are done :) No need to bother the mundanes!
(The Z is for Zulu - old military name for the 0:00 timezone)
Brought this up in a meeting today and got some weird looks but a few people thought it made sense. I for one am a fan! Will keep trying 😅
lol, why Spanish?
¿Por qué no?
Because it isn't widely used as a common language among people whose native languages are different (although it is a native language for a lot of people), as far as I know.
Even though I assume that the author's intent in suggesting Spanish as a universal language was more comical than anything else, I'm curious to know why he chose Spanish instead of any of the other 6499 currently spoken languages, that's it. I'd be fine with a it was a random pick, or I happen to like Spanish, but maybe he has some other reasoning.
I happen to like Spanish. 😄 Esperanto would also be pretty acceptable. The main language I'm against is English, although I know that's already the lingua franca of most of the world.
It would be nice. And if you start using UTC now you can be in the future now! Haha. Great article. ¡Qué bueno!
Drop off am/pm since they don't make sense in most of the world now. It wouldn't really throw anyone off because the already radical adjustment of time will overshadow the confusion.
But.... but.. the earth is flat 😂