The Two Week Transition Into Daylight Savings

It was the first day of daylight savings when I realised that the one hour difference which occurred in the middle of the night was actually having a strong impact on how I was relating to the world. The whole day I was aware that I was really only pretending that the time shift didn’t occur and that ultimately I would probably just resign to my week feeling a little off kilter.

I value the added daylight we get in the summertime, so my actions from this point were not in the sense of protest but a call for reform, at least on a personal level. I devised a simple and experimental plan to transition the shift of one hour over a two week period by setting my clocks forwards 5 minutes every day.

The first week could be described as a feeling of lag-i-ness and the week was mostly made up of trying to wrap my head around the time difference between Standard Transition Time (STT) and Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT). The overall feeling of lag subsided after a couple of days once the core calculation unit of my brain switched on.

By day seven of 14, I became acutely aware that I was half way through the transition. For some reason I’d had feelings a dread about completing the changeover for the whole week but now I’d arrived in the soft lull you feel at the peak of a rollercoaster, wherein you can see the horizon.

The final week started to feel like a shift towards the summertime and the daylight later in the evening became luminous. I could see the beginnings of summer rearing its head at the end. I also began to become quite complacent about changing each clock every day but I ended up relying heavily on an intuition of what time time may or may not be.

The experience of changing the clocks every day extended out my ability to see the subtle changes of time throughout the transition period. Every day was unique in its atmosphere and had particularities which are imperceivable in the standard, regulated and automatic one hour transition which occurs in the middle of the night.

The next automatic change in our clocks is on April 4, 2021. I plan to transition for the two weeks leading up to April 4, where I will add an extra 5 minutes to each day, every day for two weeks. If you would like join me and be notified of the next transition, please add your details to the form below and we can do it together