Changing your working hours means a talk with your boss and maybe HR. If we didn’t have DST maybe it would be a box you check when you get hired.

We spend so much on engineering systems that handle DST changes, there’s an increase in sleep deprived auto accidents, people die from heart attacks… All to avoid individuals asking for different hours at work?

Sorry, “changing” time twice a year is not a reasonable substitute for scheduling work appropriately depending on the season.

I'm betting for certain types of jobs schedules are not flexible, and for other types of jobs it doesn't matter. For my job, I skipped an important meeting this morning because they scheduled it at 8am and I didn't want to get up that early. Not sure anyone cared.

Their schedules are clearly flexible because they’re already changing them twice a year under the current system.

No, they're not. They keep the time the same. If they kept the sunlight percentage the same instead, they'd be doing those meetings at a different time each month, as the sunrise and sunset change throughout the year.

That is not true for wast majority of jobs where boss sets time ... and pretty often have reason for it. And schools won't adjust schedule just for you personally.

Nor clubs nor churches and even friends when they do party they set time.

They already change schedules though, we just launder it through the time “change” despite clear evidence of costs in both productivity and literal human life.

> They already change schedules though

Yes, because the rest of society also changes their schedules, in sync. Most people don't have the ability to unilaterally change when they work irrespective of everyone else. If they did, switching between DST and standard time wouldn't matter either—just tell your boss you'll be coming into work an hour "later" in the summer.

Clubs and churches will be based on when people can most likely make it. I think those things will sort themselves out. They already accomodate for things like weather, light, etc.

So then what's the point of any of this? If you live your life based on what the clock says, why change what the clock says in relation to the position of the sun at all?

The last few weeks before the DST switch in the fall are hell for me every year. The sun doesn't rise in earnest until ~7:30, but my job starts at the same time, so I always wake up groggy and feeling terrible. It usually lasts the whole day.

Now I'm going to have that for three months, while the sun rises even later!

I'm not in favor of switching clocks, but I'd rather switch than have permanent DST. This change caught me out of nowhere and I'm already dreading it, I'm going to be miserable all winter!

Maybe this will finally be the push that gets companies to change their start and end times in winter.

Won't this have all the same problems of the current DST switch? During the week of the schedule change, employees will be less productive and more susceptible to health problems.

The inherent problem is that we're switching the time by a full hour all at once. We could make the change more gradually, perhaps by a few minutes each week—but nobody wants to coordinate that!

If they did it all at once. But it would be totally reasonable for the company to say shift it 15 or 30 minutes a week or make other concessions like having everyone switch on different days based on a shift schedule or whatever.

They could also tie it to a vacation where people tend to shift schedules anyway. Like “new hours after the new year!”

That sounds extremely complicated to me! Now when I'm scheduling meetings, I have to consider a constantly shifting schedule! Are clients/partners/customers/etc also aware of this policy? What time do employees drop their kids off at school?

If we as a society wanted to adopt this solution (which admittedly requires societal agreement—I think you might need that anyway!), I actually think changing clocks would be the only way to make it work. Most clocks these days are or could be computers, so we could make them adjust themselves by 15 minutes every Sunday, and no one would have to think about it.

I think you’re over complicating it. Lots of businesses already change hours throughout the year (and even the week!). Think of a restaurant or museum. Different hours every day. Or places in tourist destinations that have long summer hours and short winter hours.

For most companies it wouldn’t be hard to say “no meetings before 9am from November to March”.

This is a problem we already have in the form of people taking lunch at different times. We can schedule meetings around lunch just fine.

At the companies I've worked at, people "dealt" with this by taking lunch when they didn't have meetings, not the other way around