[lucasmullens]

You need time zones to tell what's "early" or "late" in a place. If you're planning to call someone far away, picking a time "during work hours" becomes very difficult without time zones. You would have to consult some chart that describes when "work hours" are in each region which is basically just reinventing time zones.

[brightlancer]

> If you're planning to call someone far away, picking a time "during work hours" becomes very difficult without time zones.

Does everyone in your office work the same hours?

We _already_ have the problem of "What are Bob's work hours" because most office workers don't work the same hours. Some folks come in early, some work late -- some come in late and leave early.

That has been common for decades and has become even more pronounced with increased remote work, particularly across time zones.

We shouldn't build our society around a myth of 9-5 office workers.

[humanrebar]

I'll add that for serious scheduling, people use digital calendars extensively. Some sort of "work hours" would need to be marked on those, but everything else would be simpler.

[hyperhopper]

This only matters in inter-timezone communication, which I'd wager is less than 0.0001% of communication. Let's not optimize for edge cases

[SllX]

I don't know what it is as a percentage, but globally there is in absolute terms significant amounts of East-West inter-timezone communication going on all of the time. Like literally, it does not stop happening and is happening right now.

Percentages are misleading when the population is several billions of people conversing and conducting commerce at near-light speed on a global scale. Just the three hour difference between the East and West coast of the United States is significant enough to be worthy of consideration on when to call people on the other coast (or just expect them to get back to you through asynchronous comms) because people on the West Coast are on average waking up three hours later as measured by GMT.

[allturtles]

The same is true for the proposed global universal time. Without inter-timezone communication, everyone would just operate relative to their local solar noon, like they did pre-nineteenth century. The 'edge cases' of inter-timezone communication and travel are the only reason we need to care about any kind of coordinated time system.

[humanrebar]

How do they accomplish this in the arctic circle? Daylight hours are all over the place if you go far enough north.