Four months ago I opted out of daylight savings time. How did it work out?

  • I won't need to wake up an hour earlier tomorrow morning, when all the rest of you in America do. This alone makes skipping DST worthwhile.
  • I enjoyed midwinter days where the sun set at 6:30. I got an hour more sunlight in my life every day. (I was never up before the sun.)
  • I had a few confusing moments. A few visitors were confused by clocks in my house.
  • I learned some things about myself, like I enjoy being a little bit out of step with everyone else. I have a powerful capacity to filter the world so that everyone else is wrong, and I'm right.
  • While away visiting on holidays, I mentally switched to daylight savings time once. Because I didn't want to be at all out of step with everyone else then. (This did not impact my sleep schedule any more than visiting and needing to get up early normally does, except it was easier to get up early.)
  • I felt closer to my friends in Europe, and more distant from my friends on the west coast.
  • Technically, setting TZ=JEST+4 caused few problems. Gnome's panel was somewhat inconsistent. One program failed to parse dates another had produced.
  • Unexpectedly, I saved some money. Turns out that if you show up in certain restaurants at their 11:15 am (your 12:15 pm), they don't have a lunch special chosen, and will let you pick the lunch special. :)

Tomorrow I will be in sync with everyone else. That might take some getting used to. I plan to keep my timezone setting, and will be doing this again next winter.