It is clearly time to sort out time. There are all of these time zones around the world, and I guess this is so that everyone can wake up and go to work at nine ish or at least that was the plan. But who does this anymore?
There are all kinds of people working at their own pace. I have friends who do their best work at three in the morning. Sometimes it seems that they are on their own time zone but they don’t need an official one to work. The problem is that we all need a similar frame of reference. In an ideal world we would all just use UTC and be done with it but apparently people wouldn’t like having to wake up at eleven o’clock in the evening.
I have a suggestion which is pretty straight forward. Why don’t we divide days into four chunks. Each of these chunks will have two names the first set of names will be local names – in the UK I would suggest Morning, Afternoon, Evening and Night. Then we would have international names for these periods like Alex, Bob, Freda and Jeff, or whatever we can all agree on.
The advantage of the system is that for each time zone the periods would always be called the same thing. In the UK, morning would always be Alex, in Australia Alex would always be evening. This way, you don’t have to work out everyone’s time zone. It allows a kind of UTC by the back door. Everyone would know their local translation so everyone would always be able to tell you what time it was in a way you would be able to understand.
So let’s get down to specifics. What I am really proposing here is that there be only 4 time zones. Time would go from 0 to 6 o’clock in each period. Lets start at what is called midnight. For reference this is when the day starts at Night 00:00.
Then, at what used to be 06:00 on the 24-hour clock, we would have a mini reset so it becomes 00:00 again and the morning has begun. Morning finishes six hours later at midday, followed by six hours of afternoon and six hours of evening, ending at old midnight.
Now how does this help? That’s a good question, and one I’ll get to next week.