A New System of Time

In these super-interesting times, when the global village is upon us, I’m really surprised that this new system of time is not more widely used …

Let’s say you’re in Sydney, Australia you wanted to set up a telephone or Skype meeting with me in say Atlanta, Georgia in the USA, you would have to pick a time, say 10am, and then mention whether it is 10am “your time” or 10am “my time”. If you decide it is 10am your time, you would have to calculate what the time will be for me in Atlanta and then communicate this to me. In order to do so, you’ll have to figure out what American time zone Atlanta falls under – U.S. Eastern, Central, Mountain or Pacific Standard times. Then you’d have to make sure that we’re not in daylight-saving part of the year, and what the correct time will be.

Nightmare, I know!

Now imagine you were setting up a conference call with 5 people from 5 different cities across the globe.

Mega-nightmare, I know.

Isn’t it high ‘time’ we started to use a new system of time? Something more universal perhaps.

Well, as I said, it exists, and I’m surprised more of the world isn’t using it yet. I’m talking about Swatch internet time. With this system, there in no need for time zone conversions – because Internet Time is the same everywhere!

Instead of dividing the day into 24 hours and 60 minutes per hour, the Internet Time system divides the day into 1000 “beats”. And the distinctive aspect of Swatch Internet Time is its notation -  @248 would indicate a time 248 beats after midnight.

And off course the absolute genius and beauty of this time is: when it is @681 in Sydney Australia, it is exactly @681 in Atlanta, Georgia, and in fact @681 on every place on earth.

So if you’re setting up a virtual meeting with a friend in Rome,  Helsinki or Chennai, you can simply agree to meet at an “@ time”.

Problem solved!

Now there are certain logistic considerations when moving from our old system of time to this new system, and it will be best for a while to have both time systems displayed side by side. You will find a time converter on the swatch website here, or if you use a RSS reader like iGoogle, you can get a ‘gadget’ for it here,

I’m still on the lookout for software that can display swatch time on the task bar or in its own floating window, and for different ways to use and share this system. If you want to collaborate on how we can encourage more people to use this system, just leave a comment below, and I’ll get in touch.

If I take a while to reply, it’s because I generally check mail only between @375 and @750.

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