[dbatten]

I can't speak for the other commenter, but personally, yes, I have changed my working hours to be as early as I feel is reasonable. I generally work from 7:00 AM until 4:00 PM. I feel that shifting any more than that would start to cause problems with not having enough working hours overlapping with coworkers to facilitate meetings and what not. (And it's worth pointing out that some people don't have this luxury. Students don't pick when school starts, shift workers don't pick when their shift starts, etc. They're beholden to the 8:00 bell or the 9:00 whistle or whatever. And a lot of society revolves around these schedules - especially the school schedules, where parents have to be at least somewhat on the same schedule as their kids.)

Anyway, despite my early schedule, I STILL find that this only buys me barely an hour of daylight in the winter when I get home. Staying on DST year-round would give me an extra hour of time to play outside with the kids, go for a family walk, etc. in the winter months. Selfishly, I'd love it.

And I say selfishly, but I don't think it's entirely selfish. It's not like I'm the only person in this boat. As another commenter pointed out, most social activities tend to happen after work/school in the evenings. I'm imagining the majority of people having more time for outside socializing, exercising, etc. if you just started the school/work day in a couple of hours of darkness and then let them have the sunlight after it was over...

[rjmunro]

You should campaign for schools to start earlier, not for change to how we measure time. You could even campaign that in the part of the year known as "Daylight savings time" schools could open earlier still (there's nothing preventing schools starting at different times in different parts of the year).

Midday should be the hour when the sun is highest in your timezone, and should stay there all year round.

[matthewdgreen]

>You should campaign for schools to start earlier, not for change to how we measure time.

For people who live on fixed schedules (AKA large swaths of society), changing the clock is how you campaign for schools/work/recreational organizations to start earlier. It is vastly more effective than solving the huge coordination problem of trying to get these independent organizations to each separately change their interlocking schedules.

On the flipside, it (1) seems vaguely annoying to a minority of people who have more flexibility in their schedules and don't need this (but that same flexibility should insulate them from any negative effects) and (2) has some random and irrelevant effect on the location of the sun in the sky at different clock times.