People love and hate Daylight Savings Time. Or more to the point, they hate the transition to and from it, particularly the spring one where you get 1 hour less sleep. It's even been tracked that traffic accidents go up after this shift.

There's a virtue to DST, though. We've become a night culture, and many of us get up well after sunrise and stay up well into dark, wasting hours of daylight every day. DST reduces that, though if you start the day too soon, you are rising and commuting in darkness. In the "energy crisis" they made year-round DST and many complained their kids were going to school in the dark. Of course, you can just resolve to get up earlier, or later, as you like, and control your own day, but many people must work on dictated schedules, and everybody wants to be in sync with those around them.

In the era before clocks, people tended to wake around sunrise each day. Indeed, the dawn twilight is what woke them up. Then they stayed up for 16 hours. In summer, it was 16 hours of day. In winter, they would get what daylight there was, then stay up into the night. Each day, they got up with the sun, arising at a different time, a few minutes earlier than before from December to June, a few minutes later the other half of the year. This is the natural clock that we evolved to, and is probably best for us.

Japan

Before contact with the west, Japan used a very different system. The day was divided into 12 "hours" or toki, but they would not make much sense to us. There were 6 of daylight and 6 of darkness, which means the "hours" were not equal in length, and the daylight toki were a different length from the night ones, except at the equinox. The toki counted down, not up, and sunrise and sunset were always 6, noon and midnight always 9. (The countdown was from 9 to 4.) They eventually built complex mechanical Japanese clocks to handle it.

You don't have to make sense of that, but the important thing was that sunrise (and sunset) were always 6. The Japanese didn't have watches and most didn't have clocks, so they listened for bells chiming the number (as did many cultures.)

When Europeans came, they had the 24 hour solar time system. The Japanese resisted it, but the hard reality is that it's much easier to make a mechanical clock for western time, so western time won. They switched to our system.

A friend once told me he was walking in Fiji and asked a local on the beach what time it was. The man laughed at him, and said, "It's daytime, of course." While we can't all live that idyllic life, it could be interesting if modern technology let us live closer to the system we used before clocks.

A New Japan Time (Jikan)

In a new system, we would still use the 24 hours we are used to, and the minute and second would be the same. However, sunrise would have the same time every day. It might be simple to make it zero, but to match our old system, let's set it to be 7am, which is around when it rises on the Spring equinox on DST in the current system. If we work with the current convention of a 9am work start time, most people would rise around sunrise. Every single day of the year, at least below about 55 degrees of latitude. (More on the far north later.)

A simple way to imagine the day is that office work starts about 2 hours after sunrise, every day of the year.

What this means is near the solstices, your wake-up and sleep time change by about 1 minute per day, and at the equinoxes, they change about 1.5 minutes each day. Not enough that you're going to notice or literally lose sleep over it. You might get just a tiny touch less sleep winter and spring, but wiser people would just go to sleep 1-3 minutes earlier to assure they get enough to feel good.

You immediately see that this only works really well when everybody gets time from a digital device, like a digital watch or clock or phone. It is possible to make the old-school clocks work, but the plan would be, over the years, to largely obsolete them. If that makes this something we're not ready for, we will be eventually.

The much bigger difference is that every place has its own time. (As it was prior to 1883.) That could be fully true, or various towns and jurisdictions could decide that everybody in the metro region keeps the same time. That means a lot of time zone borders but they become less of a problem for other reasons, described below. There is still a stripe, from pole to pole, that's at the same time, but the stripe is slanted, and the slope of the slant changes slowly with the seasons. You will be on the same clock with all the other places that have sunrise at the same time as you.

This would all get very confusing if not for the fact that to do this, we're moving to using digital devices for all use uses of time, and digital communication for any discussing of times with people who are not in the same town as us. Done right, you barely notice that this system has happened in much of our life.

Once again, do this right and you're not even aware of it, unless you are working remotely with other people. If what I describe sounds confusing, think about it through this lens: If you use only electronic watches, clocks, computers and calendars, you are no more aware of it than you are if you have electronic calls and meetings with people in other time zones today.

Electronic Meetings and Events with Remote People

The one place you do notice it is when you will do things together with remote people. Today, you already have to now figure out the time difference, but it's easier, because it stays mostly stable. You can memorize the time zones and what cities are in them, and there will be many cities permanently in your time zone. That does make it possible to easily do things in your head. That would go away. Any coordinating of shared events and meetings would be done through digital channels that automatically convert the time. That's not so scary because all meetings with remote people are already digitally intermediated. If I say, "Let's meet at 3pm" in a text, my texting system will automatically translate the time for the recipient. Events put in calendars will show the right time. And if desired, even live voice and video calls would have automatic translation popped up on the screen, or even substituted in the audio with advanced AI speech synthesis. You'll have an AI agent on your communications with these remote people that handles any time conversion.

So again, you don't even notice things are different. There's one remaining issue, though. We have the convention of starting and ending meetings "on the hour." Live events also sometimes run that way, though we're slowly doing away with live TV outside of sports. There is no big need to do this, except for people whose day consists of nothing but meetings--they want to synchronize when they start and end. For them, people would remain aware of the old GMT, which would never alter, and be used for picking times for some multi-location meetings if desired. Phones and clocks would show it in a smaller type size, and you would be aware of how many minutes out of sync you were from it (that changes every day.) We would no longer pulse the world in hours, and we can ask is that so super valuable that it's better than the extra daylight of Jikan? (And remembering we can still pulse the world in hours, but you know that locally "on the hour" means 14 minutes after the hour.)

That part is a change from our existing practice and would raise the question of whether it's all worth it. We don't have research, but I suspect there would be a lot of benefit from using that pre-clock schedule. Our brains are still evolved to use it. If we don't get enough sun, we get depressed.

Keeping the old clocks and watches

It's possible to also do this where the time jumps every week, or every 2 weeks, instead of every day. That means the weekly change in wakeup time is larger, but always Saturday night. About 10 minutes around the equinoxes. Again, not a big problem. In this form of Jikan, those maintaining old clocks would need to reset them every weekend, until they decided to be rid of those clocks. (People would no doubt make replicas of old clocks or little actuators you mount on them to adjust them to Jikan.)

Oh yeah, the missing minutes

With Jikan we do have a time leap every day, or every week. The digital devices handle it fine. In Winter and Spring, there's a minute or two skipped in the middle of the night. Right now, for Spring-Forward day, we skip a whole hour in March and duplicate it in November. We've already handled all that pain, though the duplicated hour does add a lot of complexity. Fortunately nobody schedules anything to happen at "1:30am on Nov 3rd 2024" because there are two of them. I would personally move the shift to more like 3am, whatever time the fewest are awake. I might also propose that for the duplicated minutes that they get a new definition, so that we have 3:59am, 3:60am, 3:61am and then 4:00am on a day that needs it. It's slightly complex but the computers can handle it. Computers will actually be keeping everything in GMT, also known as UT, and mapping it to the right display time for each user.

The North

There are people who live far enough north that winter days are very short and summer ones very long. They might decide, if the day is more than 17 hours long, not to rise with the dawn. Each city can set its own preferred sunrise for use in high summer. Again, the devices will worry about handling it. When the day is less than 9 hours long they'll also want to wake in darkness. Of course above the arctic circle they can choose whatever they like. Only a few towns are up there, mostly in Norway. They could even decide to stay on classic time, as of course could any town, region or country. Indeed, if such a system ever comes to be, it would not be universal around the world, certainly not at first.

The Future

This seems quite radical at first, and I don't expect any rush to embrace it. I suspect though, as we move into the future, and largely stop using most of our old clocks, and as we become a more global species, we'll just come to expect all our use of time to be intermediated by our devices, and as we do, changing how we see time can be done without any effort by us. We'll just look at our phone or digital watch to see what time it is, as we already do. Our devices will beep at us when it's time to do things, or have meetings with remote people. We might ask people, "What time is it there?" but more usually, on any call we'll just automatically be seeing that in the corner and not need to ask. And we'll wake with the dawn and see the full day.