How much time do you waste scheduling a global conference call—figuring out time zones, daylight savings, and more? As I said in my blog post Let’s Talk at 6 on 3/4, there is much confusion about international times and dates. In addition, once Elon Musk gets people to Mars, what time is it there?

If we are going to create a universal time, we must eliminate time zones, am versus pm, and daylight savings time. No one seems to like daylight savings anyway. While we are at it, let’s move to Metric Time. This is in fact an old idea that Joseph Louis Lagrange proposed back in 1794 when France adopted the metric units for distance, temperature, volume, etc.

The concept is to divide the day into ten hours, each hour into one hundred minutes, and each minute into one thousand seconds. With this system, second-graders will not have to spend weeks calculating how many minutes there are between 11:25 am and 1:37 pm. Below we can see how that would look.

Some of the benefits we could achieve by moving to Metric Time include:

• Simpler coordination of global events with fewer communication errors

• Elimination of bothersome am/pm and daylight savings

• Ease of making the change with software-driven clocks

To move to Metric Time we need to address design issues.

1. On which latitude do we put the “midnight” line? This is the place where midnight on our regular clock system will equate to 0:00 in Metric Time. I have arbitrarily placed it at GMT -8, which corresponds to Pacific Time. People in some time zones will hit 0:00 during their waking day, which will seem strange.

2. How to refer to a date change in the middle of the day? Some places will see a day change during waking hours. Initially, that could be confusing. We will need new nomenclature or conventions to deal with that. Our current conventions of morning, afternoon, evening, and midnight is a human construct. If a place experienced the change from Monday to Tuesday at 1 pm on a standard clock, for example, they could still refer to Monday morning and Tuesday afternoon.

3. What to call the new time units? We can look to other models for naming conventions. We use both the terms Metric Tons and Tonnes to refer to 1,000 kilograms. For length, we refer to meters, centimeters, and millimeters. In the case of Metric Time, we could refer to Metric Hours or Deci-Days, and Metric Minutes or Milli-Days.

4. How to adjust our schedules? We may be used to work or school starting at 8 am or 9 am. Again, that is just a convention. It would be totally reasonable to start work at, say, 0:40 if you lived in London, or 2:50 if you lived in New York. It would just be a matter of getting used to it.

It may seem far-fetched and unreasonable to think we will actually move to metric time after 226 years. It makes for an interesting thought and programming exercise. At the same time, with our increased globalization and moves to space, I can see hope. The sequence for rolling it out could be as follows:

1. Military and Space institutions adopt it. They are already on GMT (they call it Zulu) time with a 24-hour clock. Metric Time would seem to be a logical move.

2. Global enterprises add Metric Time to their calendars. It would not require much for Microsoft and Google to add Metric Time to their calendars as a dual time. Workers at global enterprises could then schedule meetings by Metric Time, using the apps to translate that into their normal time. This would simplify the scheduling process and reduce communications errors.

3. Next-generation students adapt Metric Time. We already see young kids learning the metric system in school science class and being more willing to adapt to it. The same could happen for Metric Time.

4. Metric Time goes mainstream. With enough momentum on the first three stages, over the course of decades we could see this become more mainstream.