This solves making the statement “let’s meet at 5” be more clear globally, but doesn’t solve the actual confusion. Person A getting up hours before normal, being in the middle of person B’s day, and being when person C would go to bed still happens. All it does is destroy any frame of reference and make travel more difficult. You would still need a chart to know if any time was actually during waking or business hours at each location on earth.
It would reduce the problem to its essential complexity. Obviously if you coordinate with people from all over the world you need to check availability anyway, but at least that would be as easy as saying “Are you free at time x?” to everyone and not “Are you free at time x+offset that is different for every participant?”
Lots of people in your own time zone do not get up or sleep at the “standard times” for that time zone anyway. Time zones do not solve the issue you mention.
I have to look up the difference for every time zone not adjacent to my own now, I don’t expect I’d remember France’s preferred hours any more than I remember the time difference.
I agree that date formats other than ISO8601 ones are bad too but time zones, particularly combined with DST, wider time zones than standard and DST going the other way on the southern hemisphere are much, much more complicated than trying to figure out date formats.
This solves making the statement “let’s meet at 5” be more clear globally, but doesn’t solve the actual confusion. Person A getting up hours before normal, being in the middle of person B’s day, and being when person C would go to bed still happens. All it does is destroy any frame of reference and make travel more difficult. You would still need a chart to know if any time was actually during waking or business hours at each location on earth.
It would reduce the problem to its essential complexity. Obviously if you coordinate with people from all over the world you need to check availability anyway, but at least that would be as easy as saying “Are you free at time x?” to everyone and not “Are you free at time x+offset that is different for every participant?”
It’s still the same problem, just instead of saying that’s midnight here, it changes to that’s functionally midnight here.
Lots of people in your own time zone do not get up or sleep at the “standard times” for that time zone anyway. Time zones do not solve the issue you mention.
After about 2 days you won’t need a chart to know the time offset does to someone’s waking hours. Unless of course you have a learning disability.
I have to look up the difference for every time zone not adjacent to my own now, I don’t expect I’d remember France’s preferred hours any more than I remember the time difference.
And right now you can go look at a map of time zones. Time zones are no where near the issue that date formats are
I agree that date formats other than ISO8601 ones are bad too but time zones, particularly combined with DST, wider time zones than standard and DST going the other way on the southern hemisphere are much, much more complicated than trying to figure out date formats.