The Saturday Morning Post - Does Anyone Know What Time It Is?

It is time for the seasonal shifting of the clocks, spring forward, fall back.  When I wake up at 6:00 AM the clock will read 5:00 AM, oh the pain.  And only a week after we returned from a week in the Pacific time zone, three hours shifted, now a shift here.  

I will be blunt, I hate "daylight savings time."  When I worked in fields where daylight was deemed important, we worked longer or different hours in the summer, we didn't need to fiddle with the clock, we simply changed our working hours to take advantage of it being daylight earlier in the day, and later in the day.  In my current work, it really does not matter when I work, as long as I get the work done.  That is basically my office time policy, we really expect everyone to be available for scheduled meetings between 10:00 AM and 3:00 PM, and beyond that we really don't care when you work, as long as you get your work done.  

I don't know of anyone who enjoys changing time zones.  People whose employers are stuck on work hours, may appreciate the summer shift allowing more daylight after work, but wouldn't it be easier for the employer to allow flexibility in work hours?  Or for people to work a shorter work day?  

I have never bolted wheels onto cars on an assembly line, my productivity is not based on how many widgets I make per hour and how many hours I work.  Sometimes I can produce more widgets in a day, sometimes fewer, it really does not matter how many hours I work.  Yet most organizations base working hours on widgets per hour, like we were all assembly line workers, or machine operators.  Increasingly in a professional and "service" economy we are not productive on the industrial model, but management and accounting are fixated on that model. 

Before my father went into beekeeping, he was a machinist and toolmaker.  Some years in the offseason from the farm, he would go work in machine shops. He picked up a job one winter with General Motors, finishing parts on a lathe.  He looked up one day, and his supervisor was standing at the end of the machine with a stopwatch in his hand, timing how fast he could finish each part.  The supervisor told him he needed to slow down.  Dad asked why, is there a problem with my quality? (He was a perfectionist, he knew that was not the issue.) The answers was you are working too fast, you will make everyone else look bad.  It was near time for the farm to start up for the summer, Dad finished his day's run of widgets, packed his tools, stopped by the stopwatch-guys desk, and said, mail me my final check, I won't slow down, I won't come back. 

Here is to hoping you adjust to the time shift gracefully.