this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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I would go one step further, just get rid of timezone completely and just get up at different times depending on where you are on the planet.
Please think how confusing this would be to talk to your overseas friends. It doesn't actually solve the issue, just pushes the confusion into a different metric that is also hard to track. People in 23/24 time zones will also have a "different" schedule to adapt to.
"It's 10AM here. What time is it there?" "Also 10AM." "Oh. Um.. the sunrise is at 7AM here, so 3 hours past that. What about you?" "Well, the sunset is at 5AM here, so it's almost bedtime." "Let's meet tomorrow night then." Do you mean when the clock says PM, or when it's physically dark here?"
It's a contrived example because you wouldn't ask "what time is it there?" in a world where everywhere uses the same timezone
But you would ask “what are the work hours/sleep hours there”
Or, more likely, when can you be online/when is your business open/...
Yes. That's the point. What question would you ask otherwise? Because it's not a standard question that exists right now.
It's introducing a new concept that's just as confusing, but without a common reference point. "When is day for you?" "What's your light schedule?"
If you want to use a single time for everyone, we already have GMT, no one uses it for daily use because it's obtuse as hell if you don't live within an hour or two of it.
Not the original commenter, but why couldn't it be more like "John sleeps from 12-20:00 and is usually working from 21-5:00" and "Stacy sleeps from 8:00-16:00 and works from 17-1:00", so Stacy and John decide to plan their video call for 6:00-7:00? Like I don't super care what light schedule it is, more what my friends schedules are specifically, right? And the question could just be, "What times are you available?"
You're forgetting about days of the week, which would change part-way through the day now.
"Are you free on the 18th?"
"We'll, we start work at 20:00, so are you taking about the 18th from 0000 - 0400, or from 2000 - 0000? Those are two different days for us."
Oooh, fair point. I do think that's still tricky now (I work with an international team) but it definitely wouldn't get any better
EDIT: WAIT unless the date switched over at 00:00 every day no matter where you were
It would be annoying to be the many people whose work or waking hours were on "MonTues" though lol
Even better would be the various laws relating to things that are geographically bound.
Labor laws for teenagers over 16 typically state that they can't work during the hours of 0700 to 1500 Monday through Friday, 2200 to 0600 Sunday through Thursday, and 2330 to 0600 on Fridays and Saturdays during the school year.
Imagine the nightmare of what that all turns into when day change happens in the middle of those blocks of time.
A lot of labor laws and accounting in general become terrible.
8/24 time zones, or 1/3rd of the planet would deal with that at work.
Just put them in the pacific ocean.
Same question I asked Kusimulkku: do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Because we ask eachother about specific sleep schedule times all the time, ie, its a very standard question for most working people.
I used to work both.
With universal time, the answer is meaningless without also knowing where they live. If you have a friend who is traveling and says "Oh man, I stayed up until 3AM last night." Did they go to bed early or late? Not only do you have to clarify their normal sleep schedule, you also have to figure out where they currently are before "3AM" has any relevant meaning.
It's objectively worse for communication. As I've mentioned to other posters, we already have GMT if you want to use that. Let me know how well people understand you when using only GMT for scheduling.
I'm glad GMT exists as the middle point for us to use personalized time zones, but don't want to lose that "midday" is when the sun is high in the sky and "midnight" is partway through the dark time.
Basically you have several scenarios:
and several topics you could talk about
Assuming any initial adjustments to new systems are ignored for the purposes of the next paragraphs.
Any system is really not a big deal for local communication since everyone knows which hours are sleeping hours and which season it is (day length,...).
Communication with people on the other hemisphere uses the same times, except when DST fucks it up, sometimes at different changeover dates and in different directions if both use DST. Day lengths, sunrise/sunset, temperatures,... all differ and are not really comparable unless you mentally apply a six month offset to your own experiences.
Communications with people far away in west/east direction requires knowledge about the timezone offset, sometimes half hour or 15 minute offsets, as well as potential DST changeover dates and if they use DST at all. Every time you want to schedule anything you need to mentally convert that time to either something like GMT/UTC you use for scheduling or to the other person's schedule. If you have a regular event that happens at time x every week DST changes can make it change up to 4 times a year if both places use different DST changeover dates.
Day length and what is sunrise and sunset only really work without problems if you live at comparable distances from the equator, temperatures are influenced by things like the gulf stream and other weather patterns and geography (nearby oceans, mountains,...) in addition to the day length. So you have to figure out more details here anyway.
So basically you can communicate about any of that stuff clearly just based on assumptions in the current system mainly with people who live in the same place as you do or with people who live in a geographically very similar place that observes the same DST rules yours does and is the same distance from the equator assuming the other person has a similar sleep schedule as you do.
And the cost for that is that anyone who ever wants to schedule anything with someone who lives a bit further away has to do some mental gymnastics and know a lot about the system of timezones and DST for everyone involved.
"Did they go to bed early or late?" ... they went to bed x hours ago. If anything, the math is easier when your 3am is also their 3am(although am/pm would also have to go out the window). Time-zones or no doesn't tell you when they got up or started working without you asking either.
What if the story is from a week ago? Yes, your 3am happens at the same time as their 3am, but your 'night' is still their 'day'.
You'd have to intuitively know every time zone and their offset in order to have an immediate understanding the way you do now that 3AM is the middle of the night. It requires an additional question or lookup table, which makes it objectively worse of a system for humans to use and remember.
"what time is it" is the natural way that people have asked about where in the typical day night cycle it is for eons. We don't really have another way of formulating the question that flows naturally.
It would be the same time everywhere, but you'd only know what that meant in places you were familiar with. Otherwise you'd have to look up the difference in a big table, which is exactly what a timezone is.
We have a system for a uniform clock that's synchronized everywhere on the planet. The people for whom it has benefits already use it.
You already only know what it means for individuals you asked about it. When someone gets up is rarely useful to know, what you usually want to know is when they are available for communication/spending time with you.
Then it's really weird that people typically ask "what time is it there?" before they ask "when are you free?" isn't it?
People orient themselves to each other as part of communication. Sure, it's weird that we often like to know when in the day it is for the other person, but we do.
Nothing is stopping anyone from talking about time in UTC, yet people essentially never do. That doesn't make them wrong, it just means our requirements for "time of day" are more nuanced than coordinating business meetings.
Usually that is only ever asked as a short-hand because a lot of people don't understand timezones well enough.
Real convenient to always ask "how many hours is that from the typical time you wake up in" or "in what position is sun to the horizon" or something lol.
"What time should I call you back, or what time will you be calling me? Is there a time-frame in which I should not call you? Me, I sleep from 10-to-18."
Do you not even know anyone who works second or third shift? Hell, when I was on a line-boat, we did 6 hours on shift, 6 hours off(sleeping). It wasn't that hard for the half-dozen contacts I had set to bypass Do Not Disturb to remember not to call or text me during my off hours unless it was important, and of course I knew when to let them sleep.
Let me ask you this: Do you remember your overseas friends' sleep schedules by their time-zone, or yours?
"Some people work or sleep in irregular or differing schedules from everyone else, that's why it's totally reasonable to make everyone go through this song and dance to know what time is the normal time over where everyone lives."
What a fucking pain of a system you've though of. Imagine thinking your comment sounded reasonable when at least 90% of people follow approximately the typical "daylight time is the normal time" schedule. Going with a regular daylight time schedule is a reasonable assumption almost always. There's a reason it's followed and why time zones just make sense.
I'm not the one who suggested it. It's still not any more of a pain than time-zones.
Even for sleep schedules 90% is a stretch between early risers an night owls and people who work unusual shifts and people who don't work so they get up later and people who have insomnia so they might be up at unusual times,...
However why do you people focus so much on sleep schedules when 99% of the time you want to know when someone is available for some shared activity or want to tell them when an activity is happening so they can judge if they can make it to that?
Sleep schedules are not a common topic of discussion except for statements like "I have to go to sleep soon/now" and "I just got up" when talking to people who are far away and relative terms like "soon"/"now"/... would keep working the same way anyway.
Usually that's set during daytime during what we'd call the workday. Which is usually the time between morning and evening, something that sun/daylight often sets. Something that time zones help to figure out instinctively...
See where this is going?
Yeah, I can definitely see that you have very little experience actually communicating with people in different time zones and on different work schedules.
Solid argument, friend
I mean your argument boils down to "I make this chain of assumptions and the result is extremely useful" when in reality none of those assumptions hold nearly often enough to get to the end of that chain with enough probability left to rely on it. If you had actually communicated with people internationally you would know that.
I did make the assumption that most stuff happens and most of the world revolves around daytime, which as far as I know, is very much true. Business hours, work day, most activities, most societal happenings are during that time between morning and night and in a vague sense globally shared. So naturally it makes sense to schedule the day around that and since that general rule holds true from country to country, it does make life easier to have time zones and be able to share that understanding of time of day. You are mentioning people or situations where they don't adhere to that general rule and as far as I understood it are using that as an argument to have a different system. But I'm not sure what sense it makes to change a system that works for most to a system that would benefit... not sure even who.
You correctly boiled the argument down but somehow you either disagree about how societies pretty much everywhere work or think that those exceptions you brought up are enough to change the system that works for most. And that just doesn't make very much sense, sorry to say. Maybe there's some vampire world hypothesis behind your reasoning and there's actually 4 billion people in vampire countries where it's flipped and it's the night when it's business hours, typical work hours and whatnot. In which case, I'm intrigued and definitely want to hear more. Because doing stuff during the day and sleeping during the night is sorta the norm for us non-vampire humans. We are what scientists and I call "diurnal".
It'd take some getting used to for sure. "So, when do you sleep? Uh, not in a creepy way, I mean because of the time zone thing!"
It'd be funny imagining these one time zone advocates plotting on the map the times people usually wake up and go to sleep and then realizing they've just figured out time zones.
Except that people could stop complaining about having to get up early or late because some wide timezone forces them to ignore their local daylight and also, the information when someone gets up is just not that relevant to any international communication compared to the ability to communicate clearly when some scheduled event is happening.
You can stop complaining about any of that and do as you please right now if you are fine with ignoring the society around you. But if you have to function in your local area, work for a local company and so on, the society does generally follow a certain rhythm. And that's the same world over. So it makes it really easy to know that usually business hours are somewhere between morning and evening as defined typically by daylight and if you know the clock is 13:00 somewhere it's daytime and very likely it's business hours and very likely the person is awake.
The time zones just make interacting the world over much easier.
You're assuming that everyone's schedule follows the sun the same way. People already have different time of availability because of sleep schedules. Without time zones you wouldn't have to do the additional step of converting times or asking their time zone or being caught off guard because you didn't know their country went to DST already.
'Are you available between 10 and 16?' vs 'Are you busy tomorrow morning? oh tomorrow morning my time, uh like in 10 hours'
I don't think it's necessarily worse than what we have right now, and moving to a single timezone solves some other weird issues (e.g. the weird 30 min and 15 min offsets in India and Nepal).
If everyone used UTC, we'd still be confused setting up meetings and whatnot, but it's basically a simplified form of the same confusion we have now. The main thing we'd lose is the notion of what a reasonable time is when traveling, but that should be pretty easy to adjust to (and honestly, "is the sun up" is basically the same as "is now a reasonable time").
And when space travel becomes more of a thing, having a standard Earth time makes communication with other planets a lot more reasonable. I would hate to be communicating with someone on Mars and trying to not only coordinate communication delays and planetary rotation, but also dozens of time zones on each planet. Screw that, there should be an "Earth" time, "Mars" time, and perhaps a "solar" time as well, and you'd use exactly one of those depending on who's talking (i.e. sol time for Earth <-> Mars communication).
The complexity with scheduling will still exist - it's only shifting where the complexity lies. Scheduling a meeting at 1PM Sol time is no guarantee that either person would be awake at that time, depending where they are on Earth or Mars.
But we're past the point where humans need to do the math. There's global calendars that will do the translating for us rather than asking the vast majority of humans to change.
Not my experience at all, especially not while DST exists in at least one place around the world.
I still have a lot of situations where we discuss things on a video call or something and someone needs to figure out the math. If I instead say, "1300 hours UTC," and everyone is using UTC, it's easy for someone to say, "no, that time doesn't work, how about 1800?" or whatever. If you're dealing w/ multiple time zones (e.g. at work I deal with three, each at least 5 hours apart from each other), having one standard time is a lot simpler (we use our local time, because we're the parent org).
If you're scheduling things asynchronously, it doesn't really matter. But a lot of schedules still happen in real-time, either on a call or in person.
So instead of looking up what time it is somewhere, you'd have to look up their local offset and mentally recalibrate what all the numbers mean in relation to time of day?
That sounds an awful lot like timezones. I already do this when I'm in a different timezone or when someone else I know is.
Right, but let's say you travel to another country across the globe and want to communicate with someone back home. You don't need to calculate timezones, you just remember what a reasonable time is for where you come from.
So I think the problem is a little simpler this way, though it doesn't eliminate the innate complexities of timezones. I do think it solves a lot of those problems, because chances are you're dealing with the same small set of timezones and can easily remember what times are reasonable. I already do that today, so nothing is really changing here other than the numbers we send to each other get simpler.
Exactly, it eliminates the accidental complexity of the timezone system but of course it can't eliminate the essential complexity of the problem of daylight being different in different parts of the world.
Why do you even need to know what the numbers mean in relation to time of day? 99% it is completely irrelevant whether someone is unavailable because they are asleep, at lunch, at dinner, (not) at work,... but just when they are or are not available. Or you just want to communicate an event and that event happens at one time and everyone considering attending it just has to convert it to their own timezone now.
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