May 20, 2025
As a frequent storyteller, I often refer to days, dates, and times to help my audience gain a temporal understanding of relevant events. However, I've found that the typical way of telling time is inefficient or confusing for many of my stories. Many of the events I describe stretch past midnight, and it may be difficult to quickly map phrases such as "Saturday 1:30am" to one's mental calendar in a story that also includes e.g. Thursday morning, Thursday night, Friday night, and Saturday morning.
The main problem is that events occurring past midnight are linked much closer to events before midnight than to events of the "next" morning. Although there is officially a defined day boundary at 12:00am, a day (and its events) don't really "end" for practical purposes until one goes to sleep. If one stays up until 2am on Tuesday morning, the relevant story will likely start Monday evening, and the events of "true" Tuesday morning will (hopefully) be separated by several quality hours of sleep. So it seems logical to find a way to tell time that respects this linkage and separation.
Hence, I propose a modified form of twenty-four hour time, in which we report times after midnight but before we sleep by using hours above 23. Midnight becomes 24 o'clock, 12:30am becomes 24:30, 1am becomes 25 o'clock, and so on. On a particularly eventful Friday evening, people may stay up past 28 o'clock and decide to head home at 29 o'clock on Friday (instead of 5am on Saturday). During a particularly busy week, describing that one worked until 36 o'clock would facilitate calculations of how long the unlucky subject has been sleepless.
If one sleeps and reawakens, the time will reset to below twenty-four, but only if the sleeper feels the sleep was sufficiently refreshing as to trigger the start of a new day.
Such a time scheme is sensible in any environment where a substantial amount of socialization or activity happens after midnight and people routinely sleep after midnight. Given that most people in my peer group follow such a sleep schedule, I believe this time scheme is far more useful than any existing scheme.
NB: While preparing this manuscript, I became aware of another similar scheme used in Japan for times after midnight. However, the article notes that "This 30-hour clock form is rarely used in conversation," so I believe my time scheme is still novel.