As of Sunday, 2:00 a.m. will have a new name. It will be 3:00 a.m. Daylight Saving Time will mandate that we spring our clocks ahead one hour. What does it mean? It means we have fiddled with the clock so it will be lighter outside one hour later at the end of the day. In practicality, it means that everyone will be in a very bad mood on Monday morning after being robbed of an extra hour of sleep!

Who is to blame for this one hour of lost sleep? I have heard it was the farmers who pushed for Daylight Saving Time so they had an extra hour of daylight before markets closed during harvest. This turns out to be a hoax. The farmers aren’t at fault. I have also heard it was Benjamin Franklin, one of our founding fathers who made the time switch popular. This also is not accurate. Franklin wrote about it, but it was never passed by the Continental Congress. They had more important things to do (like writing the Declaration of Independence!) It seems that the first time Daylight Saving Time was instituted in the U.S. was during World War I in 1918. This was done to conserve energy because of the war effort. It was also used during WWII between 1942 and 1945, although it was a year-round switch – not the back and forth system we use now. The modern practice of Daylight Saving Time began in 1966. That’s when the Department of Transportation was created. It was mandated by the Uniform Time Act to regulate time zones. Daylight Saving Time was adopted by the Department of Transportation to help move goods and other commerce-related issues. The thinking was it was logistically easier to move truckloads of products in the daylight than at night. However, being a government bureaucracy, it seems that they had overlooked the invention of headlights on trucks! So we are all getting up an hour earlier next week to accommodate the archaic thinking that commerce stops at sundown!

Here are my thoughts on the practice of Daylight Saving Time.

• It is false advertising! Daylight Saving does not save daylight. There is still the same amount of daylight each day regardless of what you call the hours when the sun is up.
• Daylight Saving Time does not create more daylight. In fact, getting up one hour earlier to go to work or school means you will likely be experiencing morning darkness for a few more months, not daylight!
• If Daylight Saving Time was created for commerce, the government must not have a lot of faith in business. I have found that businesses – both small or large – figure out how to make things work in the daylight and in the dark.
• I think we should adopt a universal time standard and quit messing with our sleep schedules. If you wanted to increase commerce, getting everyone up one hour earlier is not a great stimulator for increased productivity.

Some states have pushed back against Daylight Saving Time. Arizona and Hawaii do not observe the practice. Maryland has legislation being considered to permanently go on Daylight Time. If they move forward with it, they plan to switch their clocks on Sunday and never change them back again. However, they must petition the U.S. Congress to make the switch – yes, you heard that correctly! A state cannot simply vote to go on or off of Daylight Saving Time. They have to have congressional approval to do so. So like it or not, it appears we are stuck with it. We all need to brace ourselves for a grumpy Monday and spring forward whether we like it or not.