You should setup your do no disturb settings so you don't get those when sleeping. You should do this even with timezones still in use. Sleep is important.
Emergency calls from the police, hospital, your father-in-law’s neighbor, or other number not in your contact database are often even more important than sleep.
But the damn robocallers have destroyed the primary use case of telephones. When I was a kid the phone was for “important” stuff, and “tying up the phone” with an unimportant conversation or 1200 baud modem was frowned upon.
Yeah, my mate has been complaining about this, but was too lazy to dig through the settings on his phone. Concerned, I started writing him at 03:00 AM every single night (using pre-scheduled messages) which finally forced him to configure DnD after a week or so. No problems since. You should probably do the same.
Another good read on this topic is "Saving the Daylight" aka "Sieze the Daylight" by David Prerau http://www.savingthedaylight.com/ which describes at length the confusion and arguments in the USA when some organizations had different summer and winter timetables and others did not.
The argument is utter nonsense, so much so that I've often wondered if it was even intended to be plausible and not a (failed) joke. Neither part of it works.
Take the argument that it is currently easy to tell whether or not it's a good time to call someone on the other side of the world. Currently, supposedly, all you have to do is look up what time it is there. This is, frankly, bullshit.
I call someone with roughly a 12 hour difference from me every two weeks. If you haven't pre-cleared a time to call, then you do need to know whether it's daytime there. Even if you assume the best case scenario for the argument: where you need to call someone now if possible, and want to know whether that's okay, time zones are absurdly enough not better than the no-time-zone case. I fail to see how at all how asking Google "what time is it in Melbourne" is any better than "is the sun up in Melbourne". Moreover, both of them run the same risk: your uncle likes to sleep in on Saturdays, is busy, has an unusual schedule, etc.
So the correct question to ask Google would be "is it daytime in Melbourne?" Furthermore, if we abolished time zones, a fairly standard nomenclature for talking about "daytime" in a localized way would surely develop. Asking Google a question like "what time is it in Melbourne" would respond with e.g. "it's 2 hours after sunset". Why assume Google would respond with useless information?
But more importantly this puts aside the fact that very few people actually interact this way with people on the other side of the world, or even most of us with friends and family who live on the other side of town! If you're calling someone you don't see often for a nice long chat, you don't know what their schedule is like! Instead you pre-clear a time to call with them, through some asynchronous method like text or email.
In this case the no-time-zone situation really shines, and that's why the other half of the argument doesn't work. Your uncle writes you back: "yeah, call me at 4!" and you instantly know what that means.
When I talk to my friend on the other side of the world, it's hell currently. "Wait do you mean your time or mine?" Usually he means his, so I have to go to a website, figure out the hour difference between his time zone and mine, and figure out what that time is in my time zone. If that doesn't work for me, I have to suggest an alternative, and he has to wonder if that's in his time zone or not. It's a mess! The worst part is that if you're writing each other asynchronously it could take you days to figure out what a good time to talk would be!
You can't even count on getting days right, currently! The other day he messaged me: "can't wait to talk on Friday!" And I had to think, "Friday? I thought it was Thursday. Wait, he probably means my Thursday and his Friday. I guess it is Friday for him. Maybe I still need to check..." This is absurd! Without time zones, there would be universal agreement about what day it is.
> Without time zones, there would be universal agreement about what day it is
Sadly, it's not so simple.
Let's assume we just globally adopt UTC. Let's suppose GlobalFriday starts at midnight UTC, and runs through to the following midnight.
For a person in Hawaii, midnight UTC happens around the middle of the day - early afternoon. So, Hawaiians who woke up around 18:00 UTC on a GlobalThursday greeted GlobalFriday shortly after lunch. They go to bed on GlobalFriday evening, and wake up again on... GlobalFriday morning. GlobalSaturday will be rolling around shortly after lunch.
The interesting question then is, do Hawaiians go to work on GlobalFriday mornings?
Let's assume they decide to. For them, Friday-Saturdays are a workday in Hawaii, but Saturday-Sundays and Sunday-Mondays aren't (this is how Hawaii's work week runs today - they end their week on what they call Friday evening around 04:00UTC on a GlobalSaturday, and don't show up to work until 19:00UTC on GlobalMonday).
What about Australia, though? If they keep their current work week, they finish up around 05:00UTC on a GlobalFriday for the weekend - When they get up on a GlobalFriday morning at 19:00UTC (they today call that 'Saturday') they don't head to work at all.
So Friday-Saturday is a workday in Hawaii, but not in Australia. If you ask someone to schedule a meeting Saturday afternoon, will they think that's fine, or think you're crazy? Depends if they're Hawaiian or Australian.
You might think 'we can get Hawaii and Australia to agree on working the same days'
Obviously, they could, but that pesky international dateline winds up needing to be somewhere.
Fundamentally, the model we have now where New Zealanders are the first to get up on Monday morning and the first to pack up on Friday evening - with the rest of the world following the same weekday schedule on a time delay behind them - is a reasonable compromise not just around having clocks make sense locally, but also around us being able to share the same calendar globally.
> So Friday-Saturday is a workday in Hawaii, but not in Australia. If you ask someone to schedule a meeting Saturday afternoon, will they think that's fine, or think you're crazy? Depends if they're Hawaiian or Australian.
This is correct, but it doesn't show that there isn't disagreement about what day it is. It shows there's a (potential) disagreement about whether today is a workday.
Moreover, you're just re-describing a problem we already have now. If your business, based in Hawaii, wants to plan a meeting for Friday, and someone from New Zealand is supposed to be on the call, you're going to be disappointed to learn that they don't plan on going to work on what for them is a Saturday.
So this is in no way a problem solved by time zones, to the extent that it's even a problem. At least if you're in agreement about what date it is, the people in New Zealand can get back to you with a straightforward description of the problem: "sorry, we quit for the week at 5 on Friday, you'll have to schedule it earlier or bump it to next week".
Well, for a start, they can't say 'we quit for the week at 5 on a Friday' in your global timezone scheme - they have to say 'at 04:00 on a Friday'.
And it's not that it's a Saturday for them when they wake up in their local morning, later on global Friday - that's a day that starts out Friday and turns Saturday halfway through.
Meanwhile in India, Saturday starts first thing in the morning. Europeans get to generally be in bed when the day ticks over, so it stays Saturday all day for them. But Americans have to put up with the day changing in the evening - Saturday started at dinnertime last night, and it's still Saturday when they woke up.
So maybe you solve that by keeping local day names consistent - in the Eastern hemisphere you keep the name of the day that you wake up on, while in the Western hemisphere, convention is the day name you use is whichever day starts before you go to bed.
Congratulations, now you have an informal unspecified timezone that tells you region by region whether or not people there think it's Monday yet. Eventually, someone probably would formalize that, in some sort of localization file keeping track of the offsets when different places consider 'day turnover'. That file would look a lot like a timezone file.
And this is all before you start trying to associate dates with time periods. If you get rid of timezones and assume that the only 24-hour periods worthy of naming are ones that run from 00:00 - 23:59 UTC, you've condemned most of the world to not being able to use dates to unambiguously identify a given sunup-sundown period.
You'd have to use 'day ending October 19' or something to refer to the daylight period, in your location, that ends during the global 24 hour period called 'October 19'.
Sorry - it's just a real bugbear of mine whenever software devs try to wish away timezones that they ignore the importance of 'local midnight' in defining the boundaries between local calendar days. You have to propose a solution for that too if you're going to seriously suggest getting rid of local time.
> Well, for a start, they can't say 'we quit for the week at 5 on a Friday' in your global timezone scheme - they have to say 'at 04:00 on a Friday'.
Just for clarification, when I said "5 on a Friday", I wasn't making the error of thinking that New Zealanders could say that they leave work at 5 p.m. on Friday, I was (perhaps naively) hoping that along with getting rid of time zones, we would also be moving to 24 hour time, so "5 on Friday" means "5 A.M. UTC" in our current time spec.
> If you get rid of timezones and assume that the only 24-hour periods worthy of naming are ones that run from 00:00 - 23:59 UTC, you've condemned most of the world to not being able to use dates to unambiguously identify a given sunup-sundown period.
That's correct. To my mind this is the only downside of getting rid of timezones. As the OP of this subthread said, I'm quite happy to end up with the worst possible 24-hour-period to daylight mapping out of all of them in exchange for getting rid of timezones. I simply think the upsides to the proposal are so extreme as to completely outweigh this one downside, even for a person "stuck" with the worst outcome.
In response to your other points, my view is that we really should bite the bullet and always use UTC for everything (or whatever, it doesn't really matter; if making Beijing our universal time is the only way to get China on board, I say we do it). In other words, we do not compromise to keep local day names consistent. We always and only use "Sunday" to refer to 0-24 hrs UTC. My view is that people would adapt to this rather quickly, much as they would adapt to our switching to the metric system, despite the enormous number of complaints you hear about that. (My understanding is that those in the US military already do this as "Zulu" time, which makes communication much easier.)
My only point vis-à-vis cross-continent business hours is that this strict UTC adoption proposal does not make anything more difficult than it already is, and in some cases may make things easier. Right now, you have to think about what time and what day it is for someone on another continent. In my imagined future, you have to worry about whether the person is normally working right now. It's effectively the same problem, but communicating about the problem has suddenly become easier, because you share a language in which to discuss your available hours.
> Take the argument that it is currently easy to tell whether or not it's a good time to call someone on the other side of the world. Currently, supposedly, all you have to do is look up what time it is there. This is, frankly, bullshit.
It's actually much easier than that. Just call them, and if they're asleep their phone will be on silent.
But honestly, who do you know who lives on the other side of the world, and you're close enough with them that you would give them an unscheduled call, but you're not close enough with them to know what times are good for them to receive phone calls, and you're worried that they would be upset by a phone call at a bad time?
You're right, the case as given in the essay is a pretty massive stretch from anything reasonable. What I was hoping to show was that even if you take it as straightforwardly as possible, it fails on its own terms. A universal time used by everyone would make it easier to communicate even in this case.
