A concept of new working hour “universal timezone”

Daijiro Wachi
3 min readMar 15, 2021

TLDR;

Accelerating discussions through synchronous communication is important in software development. In global software development, meeting times are often set with reference to the timezone of the area with large numbers of people to invite members from different locations to participate in discussions. This requires minority to adjust their working hour.

By adopting a new concept of timezone called “univerysal timezone” that all team members or a specific member shift by 48 minutes every day to minimize the pain of time difference, it is possible to create a time difference of 24 hours over 30 days, which can be an effective solution to the problem.

Time difference is hard

Timezone is vendor lock-in by the earth

It has been about a year since remote work became the standard and it has become easier to hire team members regardless of geographical restrictions. I have been developing software with global members in some countries for years and have had a hard time adjusting my working hour to join synchronous communication in different timezones. In software development with global team members, the time difference is like an inevitable dependent library or a vendor lock-in infrastructure to the earth.

Synchronous communication is still an accelerator

As a solution to this problem, using asynchronous communication as a standard and minimizing the effect of time difference has been a disscussed solution for a while. This is to prepare the information that the other people needs in advance so as to reduce the catch ball of the conversation.

As the other solution, I have seen that the meeting time is shift and schedule rotation is also adopted in which only people who are easy to participate participate, but it seems to be difficult to solve the issue as this causes another issue “digital divide”.

After all, synchronous communication remains an important decision-making process for consensus building in a short time.

Universal time zone to sync with everyone

I came up with a concept pf “universal timezone” to synchronize working hour with members in the world by shifting the timezone. By shifting 48 minutes every day, we can cover all timezones in the world in 30 days as it eventually shifts 24 hours.

Universal timezone table

A few challenges I came up already to adapt this concept are the following 1) Cannot attend some regular meeting depending on the date 2) Cannot meet with someone who adapts the same concept — a kind of universal timezone clock would solve the challenges. That wold look like a simple function that receives two arguments “startingDate” and “today” such as the below function:

const universalClock = (startingDate, now) => {
const start = (new Date(startingDate)).getDate();
const today = (new Date(now)).getDate();
const gap = today - start;
const universalTime = (new Date(now)).getTime() + (2880000 * gap);
return (new Date(universalTime));
};
console.log(
universalClock('April 1, 2021', 'April 02, 2021, 09:00 UTC')
);
// => 2021-04-02T09:48:00.000Z

Starting point instead of just adapting

I am quite sure that this concept does not work for everyone as it requires hard commitment from someone which does not seem to be a real plan. Instead of just adapting the idea, we can use this concept as starting point to disscuss within members on how to inclusive more people in the world.

Looking forward to learn from your experiences on how you managed time difference, thank you.

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