It’s high time to end the argument and debate over Standard Time versus Daylight Saving Time. I’m just the right person to end it. My unique qualifications and experience make me the pre-eminent expert on setting shit straight and fixing the world’s problems.
The proposal is simple: get rid of time zones entirely and put the whole planet on a single clock, set to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), written in 24-hour notation. We’ll shove a fork into AM and PM. Every clock on Earth would read the same number at the same instant. A meeting set for 1430 happens at 1430 everywhere. No one has to remember if it’s 2:30 PM Eastern or Pacific. 1430 is 1430 whether it’s in New York or Beijing.
The biggest obstacle is all in the human mind. We’ve been conditioned to think of time as AM or PM, with mornings starting around 6:00 and days ending around 10:00 at night. In UTC a day might start at 0000 and end at 1600. I know it sounds wacky. The sun might rise at 2200 in one place while it’s setting somewhere else at the same moment. But that is in fact what happens. Our time notation is a creation of convenience, and in 2026 it’s no longer convenient to tell time this way. We have the ability to change our thinking and get used to a system that, while new to many people, has been in use since 1967.
Right now there is a lot of awkwardness in how time zones work. Zone boundaries get drawn to keep clock numbers roughly aligned with the sun, but they almost never align with how people actually live and trade. El Paso is the example I keep coming back to. It sits at a longitude that puts it solidly in Mountain time, and that’s where it’s been officially since 1970, even though Congress tried to force all of Texas into Central time back in 1921. El Paso ignored the law for decades because its real economic life runs through the rest of the Mountain time world. China is the opposite. The country spans roughly five natural time zones by longitude, but it’s run on one single official time since 1949 for political unity (all hail the Communist Party). Either way, the official time zone and the reality of the place don’t have to match, and often don’t.
My proposal has two parts. One is the global clock, UTC for everybody. The other is that cities, counties, states, or whole regions set their own working hours, with no requirement to coordinate with anyone or get permission from a legislature. A region declares its business day runs from 1300 to 2200. Across the ocean another region might run from 0600 to 1500. The same natural forces that already cause neighboring towns to keep similar hours would take effect.
I’m from Chicago, and a prime example is the Chicagoland area, which includes portions of northwest Indiana. Instead of shoving those counties closest to Chicago into Central time while the rest of Indiana runs on Eastern, the entire United States is on UTC. Gary, Indiana can operate with the exact same business hours as Chicago and keep the same numbers on the clock. It unifies Indiana because no portion of the state is forced onto a different clock than the rest. Regions with real economic and commuting ties are going to converge on similar working hours the same way today’s time zones force them to. We’d end up with something that looks a lot like today’s time zones, except voluntary, and have the ability to shift gradually at the edges instead of being a hard legal line that takes an act of Congress to change.
There is also the argument that schools, hospitals, broadcasters, and every institution that depends on a shared sense of “morning” still need that shared sense. A region’s own working-hour convention can do the same job a legal time zone does today, without requiring every government on Earth to maintain and periodically revise a formal zone boundary. And there’s the added benefit of NEVER CHANGING CLOCKS AGAIN! RIP Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time.
This is achievable, even if it sounds totally off the wall. The current system was created by private industry. American railroads invented standard time zones back in 1883, on what got called the Day of Two Noons, because they were tired of running on roughly a hundred different local times across the country. The federal government didn’t codify any of that into law until 1918. The system the world currently treats as fixed was adopted gradually, industry by industry, region by region. There’s no reason a transition to UTC everywhere couldn’t follow the same path. Aviation, shipping, finance, and a lot of distributed software teams already run on UTC internally for exactly the reasons I argue in the paper.
The full white paper lays out the history, the objections, and the case for why I think this is more elegant than what we’ve got. Through the magic of AI and research with Claude.ai I was able to put it together with full sourcing.
Once the world conforms to my way of thinking there’ll be peace on Earth and goodwill toward men, or something like that. We’ll have Utopia!
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