I always find it fruitful to try to explain the universe in a completely background independent way. How to explain everything without time, space and forces and matter? I think some of the equations from loop quantum gravity may hint about something as they don't take time into account. Time, as almost everything else must somehow be emergent from a very simple ground structure. And time like everything else must be local. Such that I experience my own time, exactly like you, when reading this experience your own. Although the difference is way too small to notice.
I think what we eventually experience as time is a result of a really simple mechanism. If we take a really broad view of what the universe is we can say it is a huge heap of lumps of information that is related to each other. When some relation changes, time ticks. Each change of relation is not completely deterministic - there is always some random element, hence time has a direction. The cause of the change can be thought of as a point of action, something that instigates a change. The total number of these points is by the way the total energy in the system.
These ideas leeds us inevitably to ponder upon if conservation of energy is a fundamental property or if it is a result of a higher order error correction algorithm like, say spacetime. Anyhow it is indeed fortunate for the stability of the universe that we have a maximum speed limit and a swift mechanism for decoherence.