Daylight Saving Time: Giving the World More Time to Play

I’ve been reading an excellent book which recounts the history of a twice-a-year ritual that we now take for granted but which was once highly controversial and widely derided.  From the title – Saving the Daylight, by David Prerau – you can gather that I’m talking about the “Spring Forward, Fall Back” mantra that guides us as we reset our clocks in observance of Daylight Saving Time.

It may be hard to believe, but until the mid 1800s people used to set their clocks according to the tracing of the sun across the sky. Think of the implications: When it was noon in Chicago, it would be 12:17 in Toledo, 12:24 in Cleveland, and 12:31 in Pittsburgh.  But not only that: Using “sun time” meant that tomorrow’s “noon” in Chicago would occur a few seconds later or earlier (depending on the season) than today’s “noon.” As a result, people had to adjust their clocks daily to keep up with the sun’s travels. (To help residents coordinate their daily adjustments, cities would often lower a large “time ball” from a high elevation at a designated celestial time – a practice which continues in vestigial form every New Year’s Eve in Times Square.)

This staggering of clock time across the globe worked fine in an age when travel and communications were highly localized. But the advent of the railroads in the mid 19^th Century changed everything. Expanded cross-country travel drove the need to standardize clock time across a wider region to accommodate and normalize rail schedules. Thus the advent of “standard time” – and Standard Time Zones.

Standard time did not emerge without its detractors – primarily, purists who abhorred man’s departure from the natural order of sun time. On the whole, though, people quickly adjusted to the new order and came to see its benefits.

Then, in the early 20^th Century, came the next phase of a clock-driven world: Daylight Saving Time. The DST movement was started in England by an enlightened few who noted the “wasted” hours of summer daylight between sunrise and most people’s wake-up time. How much better, they thought, to move the clock forward so that the health-giving benefits of the early-morning sun could be experienced at the end of the day?

Many people – even those who had adjusted to Standard Time - scoffed at the DST idea as an attempt to “trick” the summer sun into thinking it was rising later and setting later. Even after DST was widely adopted as a temporary measure (primarily as an energy-saver) during World War I, the fight over DST continued into the 1920s – especially in the United States, which immediately repealed DST at war’s end.

Now why (you might ask) would anyone besides rigid traditionalists object to “moving” an hour of sunlight to the end of the day, when most people would get better use from it? The answer lies with a key group who objected on purely practical grounds: Farmers.

This powerful bloc pointed out that, even though early-morning sunlight was wasted for most people, it certainly wasn’t wasted for them. Cows didn’t care what the clock said: They rose with the sun and needed to be milked.  Farmers were thus at a great disadvantage in trying to coordinate their schedules with a world (primarily with dairy shippers) that was running an hour later.

What I find most fascinating about this part of the story relates to the argument on the other side. In the face of solid objections from diligent, salt-of-the-earth, hard-toiling rural denizens, proponents of DST pointed to the benefits of … play.

The main British advocate of DST, William Willett, noted:

“The brief period of daylight now at our disposal between the hours of work and sleep is frequently insufficient for most forms of outdoor recreation, but the daily addition of one hour … after 6 P.M. will multiply, several times, the usefulness of that which we already have.”

Among the pastimes that people could have more opportunity to pursue, said Willett, were golfing and rifle practice. Extolling the virtues of DST, another proponent summarized its purpose as “bringing the hours of work and pleasure nearer to the sunlight.”

Somehow I doubt that an argument that pitted play against work would have prevailed even 30 years earlier.  DST was an idea whose time had come, I think, because people were starting to realize that there was more to life than just nose-to-the-grindstone industriousness – and that the rapid emergence of modern conveniences was providing the average working person something he not previously had: Spare time.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

One of the foundational behaviors of the YES! Leader’s ExporeFlexSupport model is something I’ve referred to as “the Wow!” – that is, actively seeking out and celebrating the sheer enjoyment to be had in your day-to-day activities. If you live in an area that observes Daylight Saving Time, do you just take the extra hour of sunlight for granted? Or do you capitalize on the possibilities that DST provides for you to experience "the Wow!"?

What would happen if you were to do the following?

·         Treat your time outside of work as an opportunity to rest, recharge, and recreate – rather than ruminate about work.

·         Bring some of that non-work time into your work time – by sharing (and encouraging others to share) the things about your life that motivate and energize you and give your life meaning.

·         Appreciate the things about your job that you really enjoy and that give you an opportunity to play to your strengths – and explore ways to do more of those things.