In 1883 the North American railroads carved the continent into time zones so that their trains would stop running into each other. It worked, and the trains are grateful. The rest of us have spent the last century and a half paying for it.
We hold that civil timekeeping should serve coordination, and that timezones now do the opposite. They were a fix for a nineteenth century logistics problem, and we have carried them into an age where a company can have employees on six continents and a meeting can be missed by exactly one hour in either direction. This manifesto makes three arguments, all economic, for retiring the system entirely and placing the whole planet on a single clock.
Two people in different zones try to schedule a call. One of them has to do arithmetic. The arithmetic involves an offset, possibly a half hour offset, possibly a date boundary, and at least one country that may or may not currently be observing daylight saving. Then a confirmation email goes out to verify the result, because nobody trusts the arithmetic, and they are right not to.
The ritual is so common it has stopped looking like a cost. There are on the order of a hundred million knowledge workers who regularly coordinate across zones. Grant each of them a mere five minutes a day of conversion and double checking, and the world burns roughly two billion hours a year on an accounting problem it assigned to itself. Priced at ordinary wages that is tens of billions of dollars, annually, spent determining what time it is.
An entire software category exists to manage this. World clocks, scheduling assistants, meeting time finders: the industry files these under productivity, which is a generous name for a ransom payment. Under universal time, an appointment at 15:00 is complete information for every human being alive, and the ransom is zero.
The coordination tax is what we pay when timezone math goes right. It frequently goes wrong, and the failures have their own economy.
People miss flights booked across a date line. They join earnings calls an hour late. They deliver work at end of day without agreement on whose day was ending. Contracts and filing deadlines are anchored to local time, a phrase that has employed more lawyers than it has ever helped clients.
Software fares worse. Ask any working programmer about timezone handling and watch their face. Offsets change by legislation, sometimes with weeks of notice. Daylight saving rules differ by country, by year, and occasionally by the whim of a government that decided to skip a transition. Real production systems have suffered real outages because of clock and calendar handling, and every engineering organization on earth quietly re-solves the same solved problem on a schedule set by whichever parliament last moved its clocks.
Universal time deletes this entire category of failure outright.
The strangest feature of the timezone system is that its zones move. Twice a year, on dates that differ by country, much of the world adjusts its clocks by an hour and then spends a week recovering. The spring transition in particular is measurably expensive. Peer reviewed work has associated it with elevated rates of heart attacks and workplace injuries, and one economic analysis put the cost of the changeover above four hundred million dollars per year in the United States alone. We pay this to be tired.
Daylight saving gets treated as its own policy debate, but it is really a symptom. There are currently around three dozen distinct UTC offsets in civil use, including offsets of thirty and forty five minutes, and the daylight saving apparatus exists only to shuffle bodies among them seasonally. Abolish the zones and the question never needs to be argued about again, because there is nothing left for it to modify.
Use UTC for everything, everywhere, and change nothing else. Everyone keeps their current schedule; only the numbers on the clock change. Someone in Chicago who wakes at 7:00 today would wake at 13:00, the same moment of the same morning. An office that opens at 9 would open at 15:00.
Granted, a sunrise labeled 21:00 would feel wrong for a while. So did abandoning local solar noon in 1883, and within a generation nobody remembered caring. The adjustment would end after a few months. The costs described above never end, and they arrive every single day. That is a good trade.
2026