Could UTC Replace Time Zones?

You've shipped a fix at 23:00, felt good, went to bed then woke up to "it's broken in Singapore, our 9am is your 1am." Time zones are the boss you didn't hire.

What if the world agreed to one clock?

Why we still live by local time (and that's okay)

Time zones exist because the Sun moves across the sky. Standardizing local time started in the 1800s to keep trains on schedule. In 1884, countries agreed on a prime meridian in Greenwich and carved the planet into zones.

Decades later came UTC (Coordinated Universal Time): atomic-clock precise, adjusted by the occasional leap second. Planes, satellites, databases, and servers already speak UTC fluently. Humans? We still translate back to local time.

The modern pain: time zone friction

"It's at 4 your time or mine?"
"Is that Thursday for them or Friday for us?"
"Why is it still Tuesday there?"

Multiply that by distributed teams, 24/7 ops, and global customers and you get missed standups, late deployments, and weekend pings.

The boring, brilliant default: UTC

UTC isn't trendy. It's the plumbing of the internet:

Every log: timestamps in UTC
Every cloud: UTC under the hood
Every flight: schedules in UTC
Every database: stores UTC, formats later

Adopting UTC for human coordination means we talk in one time, then each device renders it locally. No zones to juggle. No "wait, which daylight saving again?"

What living on UTC actually feels like

You don't stop waking with the sun. You just label the moments differently.

"Lunch at 12:30 UTC" might be mid‑day in London, morning in New York, evening in Mumbai.
Teams set shared core hours like 15:00–18:00 UTC. West Coast: morning. Europe: late afternoon. India: evening.
Your phone and calendar can show both UTC and local side‑by‑side. You think in UTC when coordinating; you live locally the rest of the time.

Quick mental model: treat UTC like a global "room name." Everyone meets in that room, then walks back to their local rooms without confusion.

A one‑week experiment (no drama, big payoff)

Try this with your team for seven days:

Set a UTC anchor. Pick 16:00 UTC as the daily standup.
Show two clocks. Enable UTC alongside local on your laptop and phone.
Send invites in UTC. The title can say "Standup · 16:00 UTC"; your calendar auto‑converts for each person.
Log incidents in UTC. Pages, commits, and postmortems all reference the same clock.
Choose core hours in UTC. E.g., 14:00–18:00 UTC for cross‑team overlap.

By Friday, the "Is that my Thursday?" pings usually disappear.

Wait, what about Swatch .beat time?

In 1998, Swatch pitched Internet Time (aka .beats):

1000 .beats per day
1 .beat = 1 minute 26.4 seconds
Global, zone‑free, displayed like @248

Fun, cyberpunk, and briefly on the Ericsson T20. But it never stuck too arbitrary, no institutional backing. Great idea for a poster, not for payroll.

Common objections, answered

"People live by sunlight." Yes. UTC doesn't change your morning; it standardizes how we talk about it across regions.
"TV, concerts, restaurants those are local." Keep using local time for local life. Use UTC when coordination crosses zones.
"Daylight saving will still bite us." Less so. If meetings are scheduled in UTC, no one shows up an hour early by mistake.
"It'll confuse my team." Tools already handle the conversion. The trick is making UTC the language of coordination, not the language of daily life.

The pitch

UTC is the boring tool that quietly removes an entire class of bugs, from incident timelines to meeting invites. Swatch .beats was clever. UTC is the standard we already use just not in conversation.

The internet already runs on UTC. Until we do too, timezoners.com makes it dead simple to see everyone's local time and spot the overlap.