One of my favorite factoids about China is that the whole country operates in one time zone—just like the U.S. army. In most countries, before contacting someone, you have to think about what region they’re in and whether they’re on daylight savings. But in China it is simple. Everyone runs on the same clock.
I strongly believe that it is time for the rest of the world to follow suit and snap to a single clock—Greenwich Mean Time. And I have a product proposal for how to get there.
The Problem With Time
In a regionalized world with infrequent travel or long-distance communication, the current system worked just fine. Standardizing to the current time zone system across various countries has admirably fulfilled its original intent of managing the rail system for the last hundred-plus years.
However, at this point the system is antiquated. The amount of movement, communication, and scheduling that happens across time zones has skyrocketed. With the current system, the more intra-zone interaction there is, the more it becomes necessary to know where someone is before scheduling with them. This is highly inefficient.
Beyond the basic annoyance of time zones there’s the added complexities of inconsistent daylight savings rules. Even knowing the location of two people doesn’t guarantee knowing the time-offset between them over the whole year. Don’t even get me started on the list of exceptional time zones that work on half-hour or forty-five minute offsets from GMT, like India, Sri Lanka, and parts of New Zealand. All of these exceptions to the exceptions causes more mistakes the further out we plan into the future.
While I recognize that this problem doesn't affect everyone, I would make the strong assertion that anyone reading this post has run into personal issues coordinating across time zones at some point in the last few months, and will again in the near future.
Even worse for technology
If time is an issue for people, it is a disaster zone for modern software. All software has to keep time in some form—which is why Y2K was such a big issue. Software's time needs to be synced to wherever the software is being used in the world. And modern software needs to be useable anywhere.
Add to this the fact that Internet-enabled software generally ends up needing to track the time of various people, objects, and assets within a system and relative to each other. And generally people, objects, and assets can all move around.
The upshot is that for software to be able to deal with the time of a thing, it also needs to know where a thing is physically at all times. That’s a dramatically harder problem with many pitfalls and failure cases.
Every technology project I have been a part of—at startups and big companies—has eventually run into a bug or issue based on the complexities of time. It isn't incompetence. It is just difficult to get right.
The “smaller” the world gets, the more we all need to be operating on the same clock.
How to fix this
It is probably easier now than ever before to fix time, because the clocks used by almost everyone—phones—are controlled by a limited number of technology companies. You don't have to convince everyone all at once to change their wrist watches. All you need to do to change the way people think about time is convince Apple, Google and a few others to tweak their interfaces.
My proposal is that a coalition of technology companies come together to add Greenwich Mean Time to the interfaces of phone clocks, in addition to local time. At first it could be displayed as a small addition. Local time could dominate the display and GMT could be a small but useable addition to the interface. However, eventually, the goal would be to flip things, making GMT more prominent and local time less so, until—hopefully—people are fully weaned off of their quirky local time zone.
This doesn't fix everything
The sun still matters. Just because everyone could be moved to GMT doesn't mean that where a person is doesn't matter at all. Even if it might not be too much of an energy issue, it is unpleasant to wake up in the dark. People will still generally like getting up with the sun and going to sleep when it’s dark. Schools and businesses will still likely adjust their hours of operation over the year to maximize daylight hours.
So, adding GMT to phone interfaces won’t solve all the issues with time zone differences. As long as the globe spins and people don't all live in the same place, time will have its quirks.
But if the railroads successfully standardized time for their own needs and the world they created, it seems appropriate for technology companies to take the next step in bending time to help fix software and make it easier to collaborate.
Ultimately, it seems that at this point in history, snapping to GMT as single standard of temporal coordination, and letting people adjust their local sleep schedules on a floating basis throughout the year, would be the optimal answer.