I often wonder why we haven't adopted a universal time script yet, considering how much of our lives now happens in a borderless digital space. It's a bit weird when you think about it. We can send a cat meme to someone halfway across the world in a fraction of a second, but if we want to hop on a call to talk about that meme, we have to do a bunch of mental gymnastics just to figure out what time it is for them. Between Daylight Savings, weird half-hour offsets in places like India, and the general confusion of GMT vs. UTC, our current way of tracking hours is, frankly, a bit of a mess.
The headache of the modern clock
Let's be real: the current system is a relic. We're still using a setup that was basically designed to help 19th-century steam trains not crash into each other. Back then, every town had its own "high noon" based on where the sun was. That worked fine when the fastest you could travel was on a horse, but once we started moving faster, we needed a standard. So, we got time zones.
But now, we're moving even faster—electronically, at least. If you've ever tried to coordinate a gaming session with friends in London, New York, and Sydney, you know the struggle. You're sitting there with three browser tabs open, trying to figure out if "tomorrow" for you is still "today" for them. It's exhausting. Using a universal time script would just wipe all that away. Imagine a world where 14:00 is 14:00 everywhere. No math, no "Wait, did your clocks go back last week?", just one shared number.
What would this actually look like?
When people talk about a universal time script, they aren't usually suggesting we all wake up at the same time. That would be impossible—the sun doesn't care about our spreadsheets. Instead, it's about having a shared "code" for the moment we are currently in.
We've actually tried this before. Back in the late 90s, Swatch (the watch company) tried to introduce "Internet Time." They divided the day into 1,000 "beats." It didn't really stick, mostly because it felt like a marketing gimmick, but the core idea was solid. It was a decimal system that didn't care about borders.
A more modern version of this would probably just be everyone using UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) as their primary clock. If it's 12:00 UTC, it's 12:00 for everyone on the planet. Sure, in New York, 12:00 might be when you're eating breakfast, while in Tokyo, it's when you're getting ready for bed. But the number is the same. It's a literal script for the entire planet to follow simultaneously.
Breaking the mental habit of "Noon"
The biggest hurdle isn't the technology—we could switch our phones to a universal time script tomorrow if we wanted to. The real problem is our brains. We've spent thousands of years associating the number 12 with the sun being at its highest point.
If we switched to a global clock, "noon" would become a relative term rather than a numerical one. You'd have to get used to the idea that your local workday might start at 04:00 and end at 12:00, while someone else's starts at 18:00. It sounds chaotic at first, but is it really any more confusing than what we have now?
Think about how we handle dates. If I tell you "I'll see you on June 10th," we don't have to check what the date is in your specific city to understand what day I mean. The date is a universal script. Why shouldn't the hour be the same?
The benefit for the digital nomad and the remote worker
We're living in the era of the "anywhere office." Companies are increasingly hiring people based on talent rather than their proximity to a specific office building in San Francisco or London. This is where the lack of a universal time script really starts to hurt productivity.
I've talked to people who spend the first ten minutes of every meeting just clarifying when the next meeting is. "So, is that 9 AM your time or my time? Oh wait, you guys have that holiday where the clocks move, right?" It's a massive waste of cognitive energy.
If we shifted to a single global clock, the "when" of the meeting becomes a constant. If the meeting is at 15:00, it's at 15:00. You don't have to think about it. You just look at your watch (which is synced to the global script) and you show up. It simplifies the digital landscape in a way that feels almost necessary as we become more interconnected.
Coordination in the age of automation
It's not just about humans, either. Computers already use a universal time script. Most servers and backend systems run on UTC because, quite honestly, computers can't handle the nonsense of daylight savings time any better than we can. When a programmer tries to code a system that accounts for every local time variation in history, it usually leads to bugs, crashes, and a lot of swearing.
By moving humans toward a similar system, we're essentially just catching up to the machines. We're aligning our social reality with the technical reality that already exists.
The cultural shift and the "sun" problem
I know what the skeptics are saying: "But I want to know if it's nighttime when I call someone!" That's a fair point. Usually, we use the time of day as a proxy for someone's availability. If I see it's 3 AM in Paris, I know not to call my friend there.
If we moved to a universal script, we'd need a new way to signal "I'm sleeping." But we already have tools for that. Most of us use "Do Not Disturb" modes on our phones or status icons on Slack. We're already moving toward a world where we check someone's availability rather than their clock.
In fact, a global clock might actually make us more mindful. Instead of assuming someone is awake because the "number" looks right, we'd have to actually look at their local context. It might even help break the "always-on" culture by forcing us to define our working hours more clearly.
How do we get there?
Change like this doesn't happen because a government passes a law. It happens because people find a better way to do things and start doing it. We're already seeing "micro-adoptions" of a universal time script in niche communities.
- Gamers: Many large-scale online games use a single server time for events.
- Aviation: Pilots and air traffic controllers have used "Zulu time" (UTC) for decades because mistakes in time zones lead to disasters.
- Finance: Global markets rely on highly synchronized clocks to manage trades that happen in milliseconds.
The rest of us are just the last ones to the party. Eventually, the friction of managing multiple time zones will become more annoying than the effort of learning a new system. It's like switching from the imperial system to metric—it's objectively better, even if the transition period is a bit of a headache.
Final thoughts on a unified clock
At the end of the day, time is just a way for us to coordinate our lives with others. If the current system makes that coordination harder, then the system is failing its primary purpose.
A universal time script isn't about erasing our local cultures or forcing everyone to live the same way. It's about creating a common language for the one thing we all share: the present moment. It's about making the world feel a little bit smaller and a lot more manageable.
Maybe it won't happen this decade, or even the next. But as we continue to blur the lines between "here" and "there," the logic of a single, global clock becomes harder to ignore. Honestly, I'm looking forward to the day when I can stop asking, "What time is it for you?" and just start the conversation.