Think of “time” as an app.
First, let’s get this out of our ways: the need for Daylight Saving Time is a controversial topic and we are not getting into it. However, we will make the assumption that most of us do enjoy some extra sunlight later in the day and more sleep in the morning.
Let’s define “time“ first
I hate to start with such cheesy “let’s define ___ first” intro but it is important to know that time, when it comes to units like years, days, hours, is an artificial construct. We humans came up with it to make our lives easier. It is a guide but it doesn’t mean it cannot be changed. In fact, we have been changing it in the past. In 1582, many counties removed 10/5–10/14 due to a flaw in the calendar and in 1752, due to the same reason England and its colonies including the nowadays US removed 9/3-9/13. Not to mention how we’ve been adding a day to February every four years. If you don’t like the idea of changing time, you are not going to like this next paragraph.
Daylight Saving Time should happen every day (or at least more frequently than twice a year)
With the use of digital clocks (ex. smartphones, computers, and IoT), we now have much more control over the “time” being read by humans. We can add or remove a few seconds every day to “catch” the shifting daylight instead of waiting for a whole hour to pile up every several months. The “waiting” period we have now is us wasting daylight. Think of it as a daily push update to your clock app from Apple or Google if you must.
In other words, this would be an attempt to match our clock closer to the ever-changing length of “solar day” for us to gain more daylight throughout the year. We will still keep time zones for a standardized time. Vsauce has an excellent video that visualizes what solar day is: https://youtu.be/IJhgZBn-LHg?t=395.
There are different ways to achieve this besides adding/removing seconds every day such as redefining a millisecond so it’s stretchable and allows us to keep it 24 hours a day, or adjusting time on a Saturday to minimize the disruptions. This is still in a concepting phase.
The benefits
- A more efficient way to maximize the use of daylight. This means improved health, wellbeing, and productivity for the general public.
- On the other hand, less fatigue also means fewer accidents and injuries. The current Daylight Saving Time is notorious for causing accidents and injuries (via).
- Lower crime rate.
- Less electricity waste, debatably.
- Easier for most: Daylight Saving Time impacts millions twice a year. Even if only 1% of the US population forgets about it, that’s 3.27 million people impacted. In the design field we often call this a “design debt”, a solution that is a little inconvenient on an individual level but when it affects many, it piles up and causes tremendous troubles.
The downsides
- International communication: if this project got carried out in the US but say not in Canada, a 10am meeting in Toronto would end up at a different time in New York. This also includes machine-to-machine international communication. If this cannot be carried out worldwide, is it still valid?
- Some days will be longer than the others by a few seconds. It will likely cause chaos for the machines.
- Traditional clocks still exist. It will take manual effort to manage these clocks.
- Execution cost: I am not trying to ignore the difficulty of execution. It is simply too massive for me to figure out what the cost would be. Maybe the cost itself would make this a project that is too utopian to execute.
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Bottom line: we should rethink our clock…and it better works worldwide
While I believe technology will eventually catch up and solve the traditional clock issue, we need a clock that allows us to live our best lives. The amount of daylight we get changes every day. Our clock should be flexible enough to adapt to the changes.
Furthermore, this clock, in a perfect world, will not only help maximize the use of daylight but also redefine our calendar and remove all the leap days/months/years (via). The clock will need to be fine-tuned to incorporate all the factors that impact the daylight in different regions including the position of the earth and sun, and much more astronomical factors. And it should work worldwide for communication purposes.
Sure. It’s incredibly challenging, but the audience of the project is literally everyone and our future generations. If we do this right, with additional cumulative hours that everyone gains, we could be growth hacking our civilization.
It’s never too late to start a conversation to explore possibilities to pursue the impossibles. We have done it in the past by defining and improving all sorts of units we use today (time, distance, temperature, etc), we may just be able to do it again.
