[hnlmorg]

I do like your optimism but most of modern communication isn’t done via meeting invites from Google / MS Office.

I might say to someone on Slack: are you free at 14:00 UK time? Or organise a time on a Zoom call.

Because so much of modern technology is already soulless, I’d hate to see a future where the only practical way to organise some time with someone becomes via business productivity suites.

[WorldMaker]

In Discord you have Time tags for things like like "Are you free at <t:unixtimestamp>?". There's a well known tool called Hammertime [1] to make it easy to create those tags and copy/paste them into place.

(I miss Hammertime sometimes daily when using Slack at work.)

We could standardize such tools. We could make them easier to use like <mylocaltime:14:00> or <mylocaltime:3/2 2pm>. We have the technology (decades of date parsing experience and date math libraries).

Will we? Probably not. Unless we did something wild like move to 15-minute timezones and force ourselves to.

[1] https://hammertime.cyou

[extraduder_ire]

I've gotten in the habit of giving times in UTC explicitly when talking to people in other timezones. Even if I give a time in another specific timezone. (All of my computers get a world clock with a few locations and UTC)

A friend of mine works in a company with employees all over the world for 24hr coverage with handoff meetings where shifts overlap, seeing them do it for call times sold me on the idea.

[WorldMaker]

It's still possible for the world to adopt something like Swatch Internet Time for coordinating across timezones/"without" timezones. Possible, but probably unlikely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

[hnlmorg]

That’s handy. But who’s going to teach the other 98% of the worlds population who don’t use Discord and who aren’t good with technology like us?