Published on November 3, 2025 1:24 AM GMT

Unpopular opinion time! Daylight Savings (yes I say “savings”; sue me; but that isn’t the unpopular part) cleverly solves an otherwise utterly intractable coordination problem. Standard business hours are 9 to 5 and even if you’re self-employed you probably are, for example, on an ultimate frisbee team or somesuch that can’t start at 5pm because of the nine-to-fivers on the team. There’s a whole web of interdependent schedules and there is just no way to induce a critical mass of people to shift their activities earlier in the day so as not to waste so much daylight by sleeping in hours past dawn.

UNLESS you resort to the outrageous hack of just literally changing the clocks.

Sure, it makes life a living hell for computer programmers, and the original rationale of saving energy on lighting surely doesn’t apply. (Also I guess it literally kills people, but so do a lot of things that are obviously still worth it. Like ice cream, probably. Cars I don’t know. If they’re worth it, I mean.)

But the upside — more daylight in the evenings — is a big deal. And the idea that people could just choose on their own to wake up earlier when the days start getting longer is all wrong. I mean, yes, you can personally do that, but it does you no good unless everyone else (like the rest of your ultimate frisbee team) does it too. And your frisbee team can’t do it unless all the businesses do it and the businesses can’t do it unless the trains and buses do it and every other sport and club and social group and… Like I said: massive, intractable coordination problem.

I think it’s kind of awesome that we were able to solve the problem at all.

“Ok, fine, permanent daylight savings time then!” says everyone I know. There are two problems with that, one practical and one philosophical. Practically, in much of the northern hemisphere, it means starting the day in pitch darkness in the middle of winter. Philosophically, just like, how absurd is it to permanently change the clocks rather than change standard business hours? My whole argument above is that changing standard business hours earlier and later again every year is untenable. But if the public consensus is “business hours should just always start earlier so we have more daylight after work” then it’s almost tragically hilarious that the best way to achieve that is to permanently redefine time itself rather than tamper with the apparently greater sanctity that is “Nine To Five”. Maybe it’s the Dolly Parton movie by that name that really locked us in there.

(I think ideally I’d love to see a system of referring to times that was relative to sunrise. This is a can of worms though. Or a can full of cans of worms, one of which is how much nerds despise the concept of timezones.)

Body Time

As any computer programmer can attest, off-by-one errors can be dang confusing. At least I’m personally bad enough at mental arithmetic that it’s easy to confuse myself about whether I’ll get tired or wake up an hour earlier or later after the clocks change for daylight savings time.

So I think the right concept handle for this is body time. The clocks fell back last night which means that, relative to the clocks, body time is an hour ahead. If you usually go to sleep at 11pm then at 10pm clock time, it will be 11pm body time. So that’s when you’ll get sleepy. Same thing in the morning. You wake up at your normal body time and clock time is an hour earlier than that.

Body time is +1 hour after falling back in the fall and −1 hour after springing head in the spring.

Easy peasy. And especially helpful if you have children if you want to be like “ok, time for bed, it’s 9pm body time” at 8pm tonight!