[abestic9]

Outside of the timezone-agnostic advantages, .beats are about what I'd expect single notable tasks to resolve to and seem to be a great notation for that purpose. Retrieving an item I know the rough location of might take 1 .beat, disinfecting a kitchen countertop might take 2 .beats, resolving a P1 service outage I know the cause of might take 4 .beats to correct, verify and push into production. That ease is what makes it a viable replacement for me.

So after widespread adoption it could be used effectively as second nature and improve communication without the wasted thought cycles it takes to consider seconds/minutes, just to end up supplying poor ETAs. For example, from, "just a second," really meaning anywhere between 5 and 300 seconds, to a moment being hopefully less than 15 minutes, instead we hear, "need to grab something from the garage, back in... 2 beats," to mean around 3 minutes and parallelise our own movements appropriately.

With that edge, I'm optimistic that .beats wouldn't become arbitrary language after a few decades, that its use would be more thoughtful, but I'm ignorant to the psychology.

If decimal time of any description were to catch on, all systems should be updated, right down to the instruments requiring microsecond accuracy. Similarly, while we propose reformed timekeeping, can we decimalise the calendar year? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform

[elijaht]

I think you are giving this too much credit. A .beat is a scalar multiple of a minute. Retrieving an item takes one minute, disinfecting a counter takes three minutes, resolving a P1 takes five minutes.

The issue is really the imprecision of language IMO.

[akira2501]

Human processes are imprecise. Our language just reflects this. You could improve the language to the point that no one would use it, but this wouldn't have any actual impact on the "issue."

Take, for example, the way people actually use SI. The distance to the sun, most accurately is "93 gigameters." Yet, everyone says "93 million km." Why?

If you're just going to drop the accuracy, then you should switch bases to reflect this; however, people want language that matches their everyday experiences and not one that conveys a lot of additional information through the units themselves.

Language is a tool to express ourselves, not to constrain our expressions.

[akira2501]

> Outside of the timezone-agnostic advantages

Timezones are not agnostic to clocks, though. There are timezones that are offset by 30 minutes or 45 minutes. You'd have to convert those to "beat" differences and then absorb them into this system.