The Two Week Transition Into Daylight Savings

This year I realised that the change over which happened in the middle of the night was actually having a strong impact on how I was relating to the world. I became so aware that I really was only pretending that the shift didn’t occur and that I would probably just resign to my week feeling off kilter.

I value the extra daylight we get in the summertime, so my thoughts up to this point were not in protest but a call for reform (at least on a personal level). I devised a simple plan to break up the extra hour into smaller pieces and to set my clocks forwards 5 minutes every day for two weeks.

The first week could be described as a feeling of lag. I had a speadsheet to help me but the week was mostly made up of trying to wrap my head around the time difference between Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT) and the new Standard Transition Time (STT). The feeling subsided after a couple of days once the core calculation part of my brain switched on.

By day 7 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 which came later in the evening became luminous. I could see the beginnings of summer showing its head by the end. I began to become quite complacent about changing each clock every day but I ended up relying heavily on an intuition of what the time may or may not be.

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

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