daylight savings - an account

Well, that’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back… until October.

Today my to-do list looked like this:

But then I lost an hour (through no fault of my own, I’d like to add) and I had to rethink...

And this happens every year.

Every single year they take an hour from me in March and don’t return it until October. What it is that they do with it all summer is a mystery to me – which doesn’t seem entirely ethical, seeing as it was mine to begin with.

And while I am aware that I do get it back in the autumn, when it is finally returned to me it has failed to accrue any interest whatsoever. They have taken my time to put into some shady scheme and all they have managed is to cover their costs? At best, this is incompetent – I expect at least a 5 minute profit from my investment.

Perhaps I am most galled at the lack of control I have over my own time. That a whole 60 minutes is collected in the spring with complete disregard for my own needs is frustrating. Yet, conversely, if I wish to save more this option does not exist – like it’s some sort of temporal ISA, with an annual limit on the sum invested. This is another inconvenience, as there have been occasions when I have had a few hours to kill, that I would have happily put aside for a rainy day. Actually, there have been a few rainy days I would have happily have invested for use when a deadline looms. The things I could do with that time! Learn to knit, take out the recycling, finally finish reading A Tale of Two Cities. And how often have I loudly bemoaned the fact that there is never enough time to get really good at twitter?

Maybe my zeal for autonomy is misplaced – as a serial procrastinator I freely admit I may not be the best person to decide how my time is spent. But losing an hour a year for a number of months without any discernable reward seems unfair. A time pension, where spare minutes are collected for future use is an attractive idea, but we should be wary of getting ahead of ourselves on this one, as old people seem to have quite enough time on their hands already.

With all the conjecture it is easy to forget the human story in all this. And the point is that I had to get up an hour earlier than I would have had to if the clocks hadn’t leapt forward. Sometimes tragedy strikes our lives, and it is through such sadness that we learn to appreciate the little things – like that magical day in October where you get to sleep for an extra hour because the clocks go back.