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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.