24-hour vs 12-hour Format

• “Hi, Peter, I have been waiting for you for more than 30 minutes, why didn’t you show up?” - “It’s 8:35 AM now. Aren’t we supposed to meet at 8:00 PM?” - “Oh, no, it’s 8:00 AM, not PM”.

• I woke up late this morning, because I accidentally set 6:00 PM as my morning call.

• If you ask a non-English speaking folk, say a Chinese person, “when is 12:01 AM or what does 12:01 AM mean exactly?”, s/he would mostly answer “oh, it’s 12:01 in the morning, so it’s sometime around noon.” (Similar misunderstanding for “12:01 PM”).

• …

• All of the above challenges can be easily resolved by agreeing to use the 24-hour clock.

Daylight Saving

• One of the reasons for having Daylight Saving is to “enable” everyone to follow a similar time (the number) for work and/or school in the winter and summer. Do you, however, really feel it’s solving a particular problem rather than introducing more confusions?

• You may or may not know that different areas change their clocks (because of Daylight Saving) on different dates, which creates a confusion that two areas may have different time differences across the year.

• Daylight Saving does NOT save much, instead, it costs a lot because more confusions are introduced.

Time Zones

• “Hi folks, it’s Friday. It’s been a long week. Let’s schedule another meeting for 3 PM Monday to further discuss this.” - “3 PM your time or our time or Peter’s time zone?” - “ 3 PM our time.” - “oh, actually I need to change my clock on the incoming Sunday because of Daylight Saving”...

• You may or may not know that the time difference between two time zones does NOT have to be a multiple of 60 minutes. Instead, it could be a multiple of 30 minutes, or even 15 minutes…

• Time zones do NOT solve much, instead, it creates confusions among different areas in the world.

Questions

• Q: If we use the same time for the entire globe, then in some areas, people need to go to work at 16:00, and they may go for lunch at 20:00?

  • A: What’s wrong with that (seriously)? All that you need to do is to get used to it (the new numbers)

Implementation Ideas

• Start with simple: use 24-hour clock, and then remove Daylight Saving, and then get rid of different time zones.

• Do it country by country first.

• Ultimately, OneEarthTime.org