OddThoughts

I had a big of a “discussion” with my wife th other morning regarding the concept of “Daylight Savings Time “.

For those unfamilar with the concept, many areas at different times of the year, push their clocks ahead 1 hour (in the spring) and back 1 hour (in the fall) . Essentially what this means is in the spring months there will be less daylight in the morning, and hense more daylight in the afternoon.

The problem we had was with the notion of “savings”. Technically, you are not really saving anything. Although we adjust the clock, we do not save any time. We simply adjust the period in which the light is used.

So an agreed upon defintion would be that at certain times of the year we adjust our clocks in order to make “more efficient” usage of the daylight hours.

So it is unlike a “savings account”. Where you bank your money with the anticipation of using it at a later time.  You can’t “bank” the daylight and use it later. We can only adjust our notion of where the daylight occurs, or essentially adjust our lives.  It’s not like you can “save” this hour and use it at some point in the future.

So I prosed that the concept of “savings” may have multiple meanings. In addition to being something that can be “held on to” and used later (like money), which got me thinking about efficiency.

Efficiency is often described as “doing more.., better”, or doing more in less time. Efficiency implies savings. If something is efficient it must have saved us something right? If it didn’t save us anything (time, money, resources) it wasn’t really effecient was it?

So we can’t even save time then can we? Time will pass regardless of what we try to do about it.  No matter how organized you are, your day still has 24 hours, your week 7 days, your year (well you get the idea).

If we adjust our tasks in such a way as to get more done in the same amount of time, we call this efficient, and we consider that we have “Saved time”. But you can’t put that time in a time bank account and spend it later.

Often it seems in life, that the more time we “Save”, the more work that fills in the gap. So our “Reward” for saving time, is to get more work.. doesn’t seem fair does it?

Just a few random things for you to ponder.

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