Zulu is World Time – Let's GoZulu

About one eighth of the global population of 8 billion people interacts daily with someone on another continent.  So 1 billion of us are talking with dispersed family or trying to reach scattered business collaborators or "dialing in" to remote work on a daily basis.  At the extreme end, many of us are trying to set up calls between people on all the populous continents on a daily basis.  It's bad enough trying to make an appointment between two busy people in the same city.  It is absolutely nuts to set up a one-time call between people on multiple continents. Those few who are regularly travelling between time zones are in an even worse situation as they struggle with jet lag and changing times.

So, not only is it difficult to find the moments of intersecting free time – that is something that even neighbours have to do – it is especially difficult to find those shared moments when we give them different names.  I might call it "10 am" (when I'm on the North American West coast) but, of course that's also "1 pm" for my friend in Toronto and "19:00" for my partner in Barcelona. Dealing with new collaborators in unfamiliar timezones and NOT messing up your first call or two is something of an exception.

So, what can we do about this? Well, there are already organizations which have solutions. The US military and NATO and space agencies – and international organizations in general – all have far flung elements who need to be coordinated. What they use is GMT – or as NATO has called it for decades – ZULU time. "Zulu" is shorter to say than "gee em tee" and the abbreviation for Zulu is just "Z".  So 2025-02-21T09:00:00Z – or "Oh nine hundred Zulu" as NATO nerds say it – is an unambiguous moment in time understood by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

The billion or so everyday civilians who need to share times with friends, family and coworkers around the world can just use ZULU. The puzzle is how to do that conveniently.  One might think your cell phone, being as clever and programmable as it is, should make it easy to work with Zulu time. Of course, a person could simply  set their phone to use Zulu (also known as GMT for Grenwich Mean Time) as its main time. The truly committed globe trotters among us may well already do that.

The vast majority of us, though, spend most of our time in a single time zone and only need to change our own time when daylight savings comes or goes. No, we should probably leave our phones and computers set to local time.  In fact, our phones automatically change their time whenever we hop off a plane and get synced up with a cell tower. That is truly a great feature and we don't want to mess that up.

OK, so here is a modest proposal. Those who wear a watch could set it to Zulu. That way our phones keep on telling us the local time wherever we are and wherever we go. Meanwhile our wrist watches will tell us something else and that is World Time – Zulu time. This way we have two things we can rely on, our phone telling us what time it is where we are, and our wrists telling us World Time.

So, let's "GO ZULU"! It's the thing to do for the billion of us who need to fuss around with time zones every day.  If you want to tell a contact about this idea – the how and the why of it – and the tools and techniques to make it easy, just tell them "GOZULU" (one word) and that should bring them here...

https://gozulu.app/