I know this is a popular sentiment here but it bears repeating: timezones need to go away.
Time according to timezones measures the position of the sun. Except when we clearly decide with daylight savings time that we don’t care about the position of the sun, we just want it to be a certain time.
When the sun is directly over NYC it is usually 1pm or 2pm, depending on time of year, but 5pm or 6pm in London. Why? Are these events happening at different times? No, they are happening at the same time. Why do we use a different number for them?
Your “time zone” may decide that generally the workday is from 14:00 to 22:00. Why not? We already have second and third shift workers, so the idea of 9-5 is dead anyways.
When I schedule a meeting with someone in Tokyo and I am in NYC, is the meeting not happening at the same time? Wouldn’t it be easier to say “let’s do it at 13:00”? We still would need to figure out if people are awake and at work but we have to do that now while also figuring out daylight savings, so not only time but day of the year matters.
Heaven forbid you schedule a meeting or an event or a delivery or a stock trade and your time zone gets helpfully updated after you schedule the thing but before it happens. Better hope all the processes and software get that right or else!
And here is my favorite example I recently encountered: what is the speed of federal laws in the US? Say the tax brackets are rewritten for 2025, starting “January 1”. Cool, so if you work the NYE shift from 8pm to 4am in Chicago, is it the DC timezone that matters for your taxes? The local? If cannabis is legalized starting at midnight but you get arrested for possession at 11pm the day before in LA are you wrongfully detained or did you miss it by one hour?
Timezones are 19th century thinking. We can do better.
Unless you can propose a proper way to locally represent time where a person is currently present in relation to the position of the sun then no, time zones will never go away. I know time zones suck for us as programmers but it's a practical way to separate different regions that will experience different times of day differently. As long as we have clocks and times with "midnight"s and "noon"s, time zones will exist. I assume once we truly become an interplanetary species and colonise multiple planets, we will begin to use different methods of time since 24 hour/365 day clocks are going to be an Earth only thing but that's for future scientists to decide. There were proposals for daylight savings to go away but that seems to have disappeared into the ether for some reason.
Just because you personally are used to a specific type of clock doesn’t mean you can’t imagine a different kind. Submarines use 24 hour clocks and give no hecks about where the sun is.
The solution is to just use UTC. That’s it. That means in NYC you’d get to work at 13:00 and go home at 21:00, which used to be 9am-5pm. That’s it. Your whole transition has been completed. The rest is just what your calendar says. Niece’s recital on Thursday at 19:00, beers with Greg at 23:00 on Friday, etc. It really isn’t hard to imagine.
Okay. I work in Minneapolis and need to schedule a meeting with someone in London. How do I know what UTC time is during daylight hours for both participants? Well, we can use a formula that will tell us where the sun in the sky for a given longitude. But that's kind of a chore. So let's break ranges of longitude into zones and create a lookup table. Hang on a minute...
I've just traveled to Tokyo from Minneapolis. What time do I need to set my alarm to, to wake up an hour before most businesses open? Well, I can use trigonometry to figure out what UTC time the sun will rise at this location on Earth. But that's kind of a chore, so presumably each city will have an offset from UTC time that they all agree on to begin business hours. Hang on a minute...
>That means in NYC you’d get to work at 13:00 and go home at 21:00,
Fine.. so I'm going to have a teleconference with a company in NYC. Due to what you wrote above I now have an idea of what UTC time window to plan for - after all, I want to be able to reach them during their working hours.
Then on Friday I have to schedule a teleconf with a company in Japan. When do they work, relative to UTC? You forgot to add that, so I have to find it somewhere.
Hm, wouldn't it be nice if my computer could keep track of the working hours everywhere in the world. Let's make a database of that.. There's just one issue: How is this any better than using the timezone system we already have? Using that, I can figure out the local time in those places, and I can safely assume that they'll at least be working from around 09:00 local time. Having to instead keep track of their working hours relative to UTC doesn't seem like much of an improvement to me.
You got it exactly right up to the last sentence. Yes it is exactly the same amount of work to figure out how to make a long distance phone call or schedule a meeting.
Except for most people it is almost never a problem because most people aren’t scheduling phone calls or meetings with unfamiliar locations.
The benefit is obvious: things that happen at the same time have the same number associated with them. Just like we currently coordinate dates using a shared calendar, we coordinate times. And that has a local benefit as well. Aside from no more daylight savings time which we can achieve using other means, we also know when world events happen as they are being reported, we know when certain things take effect for countries that span multiple timezones now, we know the exact difference between any two given time points without asking “but where are they happening?”
Again, imagine that we had unified time and some country somewhere said “hey we are using the same format but doing our own variable offset from it”. That would be absolutely asinine. We are used to timezones and think they benefit us because of that familiarity. In reality we have had variable time even in the same timezones before and it was universally a bad idea that was shut down soon as people started traveling.
Oh and consider that due to cultural differences your example of scheduling meetings is already flawed: do you know if Tokyo wraps up the workday at 4pm or 6pm? Is there an hour or two hour lunch break in Barcelona? When do people actually come to work in Rome? Are banks open on Saturdays in Baghdad? Timezones do not solve these issues whatsoever so you still need to do the lookup of “when are people actually around” when scheduling a meeting outside of your culture.
1) Daylight saving time has absolutely nothing to do with this, and in any case a lot of people, me included, are of the opinion that DST is a Bad Thing and should be abolished.
2) If you want to let everybody in the world know when something specific happens (e.g. the launch of the first manned Mars mission), then you specify the time in UTC. But.. that's what we do already. Or at least those with some sense. There's still no need to force Joe Nobody to get to work at 14:00 (assuming a single world time zone) when the sun rises.. there's no advantage for people elsewhere in the world. You yourself argued that "most people aren't scheduling phone calls or meetings with unfamiliar locations". So, what's the advantage here?
3) I happen to use a calendar which is coordinated with others - it happens automatically, when they schedule something. And it has zero problem with the time - it's not just date. There's zero to gain by using UTC as localtime everywhere. That does nothing for the calendar.
4) Cultural differences in work hours: They absolutely exist. So what would having everybody use UTC help with? You still have to know those differences. It's even worse then, because if my stepson tells me "I have to work to 10AM" then I know it's late, for him. I know it instantly. If he had said "..have to work to 13 UTC" then I'm lost. I don't immediately see that he's actually working very late. I'll have to think "let's see.. he's in Tokyo, so that would be, hmm, this many hours difference from here.. is there an issue here? Oh wait, "you're working really late, will you be you okay?"
5) And that statement ".. most people aren't scheduling phone calls or meetings with unfamiliar locations". That's false. We're not in the 19th or even the 20th century anymore. The internet is a thing, and tons of people are in daily contact with people from all over the world. Just a moment ago I got a message from an airbnb guest, for example.
4) Argh, I meant 10pm or it doesn't make sense - I shouldn't try to use English time-units, I should stick to the 24-hour system I know. I always mess up that.
Traveling would be so much more disorienting. Forgetting what the local daytime range is and checking the position of the sun to guess whether you're closer to the front or back half of the day. Having to consult a table to figure out exactly how much you're going to inconvenience the person giving you a ride from the airport. Accidentally running into rush hour because you forgot that 1100 is 5:00 here. LOL.
So like when you fly from London to NYC and have no idea how long the flight actually is because it leaves at 10am and arrives at 9am? Timezones explicitly make travel harder, not easier.
Why don't people just do this then? There's no overwhelming obligation on individuals to use the local timezone.
I also think that your using the example of submarines -- notoriously an onerous lifestyle that very few are capable of living -- pretty much torpedoes your implicit suggestion that this would not be too much of a change.
The reason it is hard being on a submarine isn’t because of the clock. That’s like saying that it is hard to be a construction worker because the hard hats aren’t fashionable.
And the reason why people don’t just do that is because it is a network effect problem. We all need to buy into it. Like the metric system or driving on the same side of the road.
And people do this. Haven’t you seen people who routinely talk to people outside their timezones sign their email with their location and/or UTC work hours?
Along the same vein… how are public holidays supposed to be handled? Do those always start and finish at midnight UTC, even if midnight UTC happens to be right during the middle of the solar day (and everybody's waking hours)? Or does every place define a specific time (aligned to solar midnight or some other suitable point during the night) for when holidays are supposed to start and end, which is basically reintroducing timezones through the back door?
>Say the tax brackets are rewritten for 2025, starting “January 1”
U.S. income taxes are calculated on an annual basis, not hourly, so that is not an issue. (Wages are taxed according to when they are paid, which is a specific point in time, not according to when they were earned). A better example is trying to figure which calendar (tax) year an item of income or deduction belongs to. On tax professional forums, there are occasional discussions about what happens if I make a business payment online just before New Year's Day begins, but the recipient doesn't "constructively receive" it until after (or similar scenarios involving time zone differences). Do I get a deduction for the old year, but they have income in the new year? (The best answer, of course, is to not wait until a few hours before a deadline to conduct business transactions of this type, but not every type of business has that choice available).
Look at it from the other direction for a moment: say we started with universal time. The whole world used UTC. Now try suggesting timezones. The idea would look absolutely insane. It would be a non-starter discussion.
On the other hand the transition from timezones to UTC has some challenges but the idea itself is very worth considering. What does this tell you?
Why would that look insane at all? It's like saying that letting everybody everywhere be able to say "I work from nine to five" is insane. Or that saying that the date changes to the next day when it's midnight is insane.
Because we had that. The reason GMT exists is because train stations in England all ran on different clocks. The train could leave at 11am and arrive at 10:55 at the next station because the clocks could be that far apart. And that was confusing so they said “hey you know what’s a good idea? Having a coordinated time!”
Going back to that would make things more confusing. You take it for granted that we all use the same calendar. Nobody signs your paycheck using the Chinese calendar, right? You likely agree that the US using the imperial system is silly because wouldn’t the world be in a better place if we all used metric. So why the resistance to this?
Huh?
We're arguing that timezones make sense and that keeping the world in a single timezone ("UTC everywhere") would not be a good option. You seemed to argue that if timezones hadn't already been invented then the idea of a local time would be insane. That's what I was replying to.
I like the point of this article, but it takes a very long, winding, roundabout way to get there. I wish there was a better written article we could copy-paste when people make this suggestion.
Meetings tend to start at most at quarter-hour intervales, or about 1/100th of a day.
If everyone used swatch times meetings would tend to start at intervals of 20, or maybe tens. Your meeting would start at @580 and last until @600 rather than 1300 to 1330 or whatever.
Nah. Any solution you come up with that accounts for how humans actually use time will just reinvent time zones. Could they be more cleanly specified than they are? Sure. But that's just an artifact of grandfathering in historical practices.
The point is really that as long as we don't live on Discworld we have to divide the world into time zones. Either using different local time zones, or using local awake/sleep zones. Either way you have time zones.
Did you consider the aspect, that in many countries the date would change during the day?
So in UTC-5 the day would end at 19:00 solar time. „Lets meet up for dinner on Thursday“ would become completely ambiguous, depending on the time. If you move dinner on Tuesday at 18:30 (23:30 UTC) to an hour later, it would be on Friday at 0:30 UTC.
Common types calendars would become quite useless, they would need to be different for each timezone. It doesn’t make sense to split the events of one solar day into multiple day-columns in a calendar.
The vast majority of people plan their life around solar days, they usually don’t have appointments planned that span over two calendar days.
You would have to give up many concepts that have local relevance, while gaining better understanding with non-local interlocutors. I think the balance depends on how many of your daily interactions happen at local or non-local scope.
Swatch tried it in the 90s and failed. Maybe we are more globalized today...
It is much harder to do. We all speak the same 24 hour clock and it is not a culturally significant thing. It would be nice if everyone could understand everyone but there is something to be lost by losing languages. There is absolutely nothing to be lost by doing away with timezones.
Of course there's something lost. If I see my colleague's local time will be 9:00PM, I know not to schedule a meeting then. It's a method for translating familiar associations of hours across space.
Also, and more importantly, "it's 5:00 somewhere!" would cease to be true.
Time according to timezones measures the position of the sun. Except when we clearly decide with daylight savings time that we don’t care about the position of the sun, we just want it to be a certain time.
When the sun is directly over NYC it is usually 1pm or 2pm, depending on time of year, but 5pm or 6pm in London. Why? Are these events happening at different times? No, they are happening at the same time. Why do we use a different number for them?
Your “time zone” may decide that generally the workday is from 14:00 to 22:00. Why not? We already have second and third shift workers, so the idea of 9-5 is dead anyways.
When I schedule a meeting with someone in Tokyo and I am in NYC, is the meeting not happening at the same time? Wouldn’t it be easier to say “let’s do it at 13:00”? We still would need to figure out if people are awake and at work but we have to do that now while also figuring out daylight savings, so not only time but day of the year matters.
Heaven forbid you schedule a meeting or an event or a delivery or a stock trade and your time zone gets helpfully updated after you schedule the thing but before it happens. Better hope all the processes and software get that right or else!
And here is my favorite example I recently encountered: what is the speed of federal laws in the US? Say the tax brackets are rewritten for 2025, starting “January 1”. Cool, so if you work the NYE shift from 8pm to 4am in Chicago, is it the DC timezone that matters for your taxes? The local? If cannabis is legalized starting at midnight but you get arrested for possession at 11pm the day before in LA are you wrongfully detained or did you miss it by one hour?
Timezones are 19th century thinking. We can do better.