So You Want To Abolish Time Zones

In a nutshell:

Before abolishing time zones:

I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?

Google tells me it is currently 4:25am there.

It's probably best not to call right now.

After abolishing time zones:

I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?

It is 04:25 ("four twenty-five") there, same as it is here.

Does that mean I can call him?

I don't know.

We have GMT/UTC for that purpose.

But do you want to see your clock at 02:00 and say "time to go to work"?

We do, it's UTC

You mean like UTC? That thing we already have?

It's a cool idea, but then you lose the local representation of the daylight cycle, which just complicates things again as you try to schedule things with people in other countries without knowing if it's their bedtime or not.

I play games with international friends and work with international colleagues, so I have my fair share of troubles with time zones. If anything, abolishing daylight savings worldwide would yield much better results.

On a side note, when scheduling events on Discord, I like to add in a unix timestamp that shows everybody their local time. Quite convenient!

Doing this would lose a sense of work vs home time for people. I have some coworkers on the other side of the world, I look at their time and know they shouldn't be online anymore. I tell them things like "Go be with your family" or "Must be sleepy considering how late it is for you".

It gives me a sense of humanity to know if it's 8pm their time, it's way too late for them to be working. I'm sure I could adjust if we all used UTC but it would be so stupid to change.

Also imagine hours for businesses all sounding weird as heck lol.

We cant get Americans to use metric...

You'll basically have timezones either way, there's just two ways of doing it.

If we all used UTC, then businesses would need to change what time they opened depending on their location. Ex: Best Buy opening at 12 noon on the US west coast, and 3pm on the east coast. Locations inbetween would have different opening times. So we would get the noon zone, 1pm zone, 2pm zone, and 3pm zone. All nation wide businesses with standard open/close times would effectively follow the same pattern, and it would be best if they all coordinated on where those zones occured. So then we would get new timezones, they'd just be slightly different in how they functioned.

We do, it's called Universal Coordinated Time. The time is now 00:37 UTC, or 16:37 Pacific Daylight Savings Time.

Pilots already do this. Everything in aviation is "ZULU" time. In computers, we call it UTC or +0000. It actually works really well because we cross time zones so easily.

I would totally be in favor of switching to a universal time zone. But inertia is hard to overcome. Most people don't change time zones very often as they're usually far from population centers and people know that when they take a trip, that's when the time zone will change so for most it's not a daily concern and getting used to a new time zone model would be annoying. When you tell people about the US state of Indiana, they really start to change their minds, that place is fucked up.

Hint: Reykjavik, Iceland is a major city that uses UTC always, no Daylight Savings Time there. I always keep my second time zone on my watch and phone set to that.

People that proposes to replace local timezones with global UTC must be living in europe where it doesn't impact them much if we do abolish the timezone. Now consider people that lives in the other side of the planet. Most people are active during the day, yet for them, the day will end right in the afternoon under the new system. So you tell your friend "hey, let's meet tomorrow", then your friend would be like "do you mean this afternoon, or in the morning next day?". No way people living in the asia pacific would accept this without military intervension.

For synchronizing of things like work and school we'd still end up with zones all using the same local hours (the day goes from 4:00 to 4:00 to e.g.) so we'd still end up with timezones there...

All of the clocks around the world would read the same, sure, but now you have no idea what part of the day 4:00 is somewhere else. You'd end up doing almost the same math as we do now by offsetting their time from yours so you could understand it (4:00 is the same as my 13:00 for e.g. so it's one hour past noon over there) but now we lose the shared understanding of which numbers correspond to which times of day. This means you'd be having to mentally convert all their new times of day to the clock time instead of having intuitive sense of their meaning.

Instead of seeing the local time is 12:00 and immediately knowing it's noon, now you'd look up what time their day started and see how many hours it's been since then (12, so it's noon there) and that offset is how you'd need to think of it and already what clocks show now...

It would make checking the meeting time a little easier, but make scheduling it way way harder. When scheduling a meeting I want to try to make it reasonable for everyone in the meeting and without time zones I'd have to look up a unique table of when daytime is for every location. That sounds so much worse to me than having a standardized time offset where reasonable working hours are pretty consistently defined. And the main time where I need to check time zones are at scheduling time anyways. When it comes to checking the meeting time everything I use already automatically converts the time to my local time.

Because it:

• causes the question "What time is it there?" to be useless/unanswerable

• necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time

• convolutes timetables, where present

• means "days" are no longer the same as "days"

• complicates both secular and religious law

• is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people

• makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world

• does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time

• is not simpler at all

Humans, generally, like to be awake when the sun is visible and asleep when it isn't. The way we structure our thinking about time, morning, noon, evening, night, are based on the position of the sun.

The single time zone thing sounds appealing until Germans have to be up at 2 AM to speak with their bosses in NYC as that's a financial power center and thus gets to dictate the meeting times

Because time relates to the position sun and tells us something about what period of the day it is in that timezone. Your proposal would strip off that information, which means that you would have to look up in a different system what the business hours are in another country, when it’s night, etc. That means that you’re basically reinventing timezones by putting them in a separate system, which defeats the purposes and makes it more complicated than it already is.

Sure, time differences might be a bit cumbersome, but timezones have a name and can be converted from one to another. Also, most digital calendars (for meetings, etc) have timezone support and work perfectly fine when involving people from multiple timezones. To find a good moment to meet, you will still have to keep the time difference in mind, but in the current system you can at least take it into account just by looking at the time difference.

We do (known as Zulu/Military time, Greenwich Mean Time, or Universal Time Coordinated) but it's not convenient for the average person to use locally, so almost everyone defaults to whatever their time zone is.

Fun fact: In 1793 France defined the metric time consisting in one single timezone, 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute. The people never used it and everyone forgot about it. It was later renamed decimal time

We do. It's called swatch time.

(Seriously)

It wouldn't make it easier to arrange meetings because you'd have no clue if you were arranging the meeting for when people would be at work, have finished for the day, or fast asleep at night.

Here’s a hypothetical store in a place where, say, 9:00 is now 23:00 using global time. The store would have been open 9:00-21:00 Mon and Wed, and 10:00-22:00 on Tuesday. But with global time it would look like this:

Mon 23:00 - Tue 11:00

Wed 0:00 - 12:00

Wed 23:00 - Thu 11:00

Not to mention the general headache of having the day change over in the middle of the day every day. “Meet me tomorrow” when tomorrow starts at lunchtime.

Plus, although you’d easily be able to set up international meetings in terms of getting the time right, you will have no idea whether any given time is during work hours in the other country, or even if people would be sleeping. Instead of having time zones you could look up, we’d have to look up a reference chart for, say, when lunchtime is in a country and extrapolate from there. Or imagine visiting a country and you need to constantly use a reference guide to figure out the appropriate time for everything throughout the day.

Books that reference time would all be specific to their time “zone”.

It would make so much sense to have a universal time that everyone can refer to for that use case of wanting to schedule things. And, in fact, UTC already exists.

I'm a proponent of this myself. I think the big barrier to just using UTC everywhere is with the clock as a symbol: right now if you're watching a movie or a TV show and see someone's alarm going off at 6:00, you know "oh, they're a pretty early riser." If everyone used UTC, that time could be local noon, or the person could be late for work, out any number of other things.

That also applies to when people move to a new place; if I'm used to having lunch at 20:00 UTC and then move across the country, suddenly lunch is at 17:00 UTC. Symbols are really important to people, so I think these are both problematic. Meetings would be easier, but offline life would be harder.

Which is easier- looking up what time it is in Munich, or looking up what part of the day it is and the hours typically kept by people in Munich? What if you need to schedule a call with your business partners?

I feel like this is something that would only benefit well-off people in the developed world at the inconvenience of less well-off people around the world.

"This would make it easier to coordinate digital meetings with my colleagues at my international corporation!" Lol