In a week, we will spring forward to daylight saving time. Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy all recently shared their desires to end the biannual flip-flopping of our clocks. The Republican senator Rick Scott recently reintroduced the Sunshine Protection Act, which would lock our clocks on daylight saving time. Scientists, meanwhile, urge us to adopt the opposite: permanent standard time.
The DST debate is heating back up. But all this chatter is, once again, largely missing the point–an omission particularly glaring for an administration that claims to be seeking greater efficiency.
The time displayed on our walls and wrists carries only the meaning we attach. If we want to rein in our nation’s spending, if we want to make America healthy again, then we should turn attention to our inner clocks. For starters, we should nudge companies and schools to relax or revise rigid schedules – rather than, for example, reverting to pre-pandemic in-office requirements.
We are all born with inner clocks, better known as our circadian rhythms. These biological drumbeats sync with our planet’s patterns to drive our bodies to do the right things at the right times: fall asleep, digest food, and fight pathogens, to name a few vital functions. But our internal timekeepers don’t all tick the same. Your 7am might be my 2pm.
The upshot: a lot of money could be saved, and illness avoided, if we dropped the traditional one-schedule-fits-all that gives the clock-on-the-wall so much sway.
More circadian-friendly schedules mean more people can wake, work, and learn in closer alignment with their inner clocks. They get more sleep. They take fewer sick days. This is especially true for night owls, whose circadian rhythms are most incongruous with the long-established early bird-biased schedules. Sleep loss alone is estimated to cost the US economy upwards of $400bn a year due to absenteeism, accidents, and reduced productivity. That’s around 1.5% of the country’s GDP – and far more than the approximately 1% of the GDP that pays the salaries of all federal civilian employees, whose jobs have been under attack.
Impacts on sleep and sickness aside, it also pays to allow people to work or study during their peak hours of productivity and performance. Alertness, cognition, and learning fluctuate across the day. So does our ability to think critically, communicate effectively, and act morally. Risks of costly lapses of attention and reaction ride these waves, too. And, again, the ebbs and flows are unique for every person.
A business’s market value is now about 90 percent intangible – tied to assets like IP, relationships and reputation. In other words, companies are investing primarily in employees’ brainpower. A few have begun optimizing those investments by taking advantage of our biological diversity.
Magne Skram Hegerberg, secretary general for the Norwegian Association of Lawyers, told me he uses a curious tool to utilize peak brainpower: an army of plush frogs. During their personal power hours, employees will place one of these brightly colored plush animals on their desk or the door to their office. This signals others to “frog off”. Starting times among his workers also now range from 6.30am to 2.30pm. Meetings are held midday, when early birds and night owls overlap. After making these changes, he said, productivity in some areas doubled and, more broadly, innovation, creativity, and problem-solving improved.
Camilla Kring, founder of the Copenhagen-based B-Society, has advised Hegerberg and other companies including medical giants Medtronic and AbbVie. She has watched job satisfaction rise and sick days plummet. Her end goal, she said, is to create a “new time architecture” that helps everyone better live by their inner clocks. And that includes B-persons, her term for night owls, an often-stigmatized club to which Trump and Musk belong. “You are born with this rhythm,” said Kring. “It’s not something you choose.”
Among the few good things to come out of the Covid pandemic was a glimpse into a more sun-synced life. Some studies found that people, especially night owls, tended to get more sleep and maintain healthier circadian rhythms as school and work schedules were relaxed. But much of that greater flexibility is now being reversed. The Trump administration has issued an executive order to end remote work for federal workers, a mandate pushed by Musk, who enforces strict in-office policies at Tesla, SpaceX, and X. Amazon, too, made the move in January. JP Morgan and Dell plan to do the same in March. Emerging policies that restrict where an employee works also tend to define when. And that can result in wasted resources.
Sure, there are benefits to having employees in the office. It can reduce loneliness, encourage teamwork, and inspire creativity. But workplaces can still foster flexibility. Business leaders can spread out work hours and schedule meetings, lunches, and other events for the middle of the day. Those gatherings would probably be more pleasant and productive, anyway, with fewer sleep-deprived and circadian-disrupted participants. And who wouldn’t also appreciate a means to stem the recent rebound in traffic congestion?
Some secondary schools in Europe similarly offer students the choice of earlier or later electives while concentrating core subjects to midday periods. And a growing number of middle and high schools in the US have delayed their first bell, acknowledging that traditionally early start times are biologically backwards. Rhythms don’t just vary between us; they also change within us, drifting significantly later during adolescence. But overall progress remains slow.
The consequences of permanent DST would disproportionately impact teens and other night owls. When required to arrive at a strict time for work or school, DST effectively forces them up an hour earlier than their already-late preference. The later sunrise also means they get less of the morning light that their rhythms rely on to avoid drifting even later. Some early birds, on the other hand, might appreciate the additional evening light with DST. It can nudge their bodies to postpone pumping out melatonin and let them enjoy a night out with friends.
But rather than arguing over whether or how to lock the clock, a more efficient use of regulatory resources is to steer society away from strict schedules, as well as non-essential shift work and illogically drawn time zones. (For the record, there is still one wrong answer: Permanent DST would steal an hour of morning light and tack it onto the evening, further blurring the day-night contrast our inner clocks crave.)
Neither Trump nor Musk appear conscious of the value and vulnerability of their inner clocks. Trump regularly posts on social media in the early hours of the morning; Musk wore sunglasses throughout last week’s CPAC conference. Still, it is in their power to help themselves and the American people better live and work with–rather than against–their inner clocks, regardless of whether the clock on the wall reads DST or standard time. It is a matter of efficiency that they would be foolish not to embrace.
