This is bit of an outrageous post! The conventional clock time and our daily activities have always been a bit of an enigma. It is pretty obvious that we end up wasting a large proportion of our valuable daylight, by sticking to this arrangement. Consider this usual Indian daily routine - sunlight breaks at 6.00 AM, wake up at 7.00 AM, off to office at 10.00 AM, work till 6.00 PM (or 8.00 PM), sunset at 6.00 PM, get back home by 8.00 PM (or 10.00 PM).
Office timings across the country are typically from 10.00 AM to 5.00 PM. But late evenings, most often extend up to 8.00 PM or 9.00 PM, which means working 2-3 hours after it becomes dark. Late evenings and even nights at workplace, has become the norm in most private sector firms, especially in the new generation of knowledge-based companies. Surprisingly, theĠsame is true of Government departments, especially above a certain level.
This arrangement leads to a very inefficient utilization of daylight and human productivity. Here is how the daylight balance sheet squares up.
Total daylight hours - 12 hours
Daylight hours before work in morning - 4 hours
Daylight hours spent working - 8 hours
Night hours spent working - 2-3 hours
Night hours spent travelling - 1-2 hours
Total night hours spent on work - 3-5 hours
Leisure time - Only night and late night hours
In light of the above, it would seem only too logical to argue in favor of starting work at 7.00 AM and closing it officially by 3.00 PM, so that even granting for overtime, all work closes by atleast 6.00 PM when darkness descends. To reduce the psychological dislocation, we can turn the clock forward by three hours, so that the present 7.00 AM corresponds to the familiar office time of 10.00 AM! We can rationalize internally that it is an eternally long winter in which dawn comes very late, and hence wake up before sunlight breaks! This would be an economically efficient outcome and will make more optimum use of available daylight.
What are the benefits of more efficiently utilizing our daylight? I have tried to list out a few,
1. Less energy consumption during daytime. Hence potential for energy savings is huge if our work is mostly done during daytime.
2. Early mornings bring out higher productivity, and late afternoons lowers productivity. The employer gets the most productive times of the employee.
3. Gives employees enough meaningfully usable leisure time after work. Any leisure time in the mornings is not of much use, and late evenings means limited time for leisure. And leisure too needs daylight!
4. Commuting to and from work takes place during the daytime, and this improves the logistics and reduces costs, besides increasing safety. (Traffic congestion is much higher during the night than mornings, and road accidents are higher during nights!)
5. Early mornings are the most productive times and also the least leisure providing (working women have to cook, get children ready, and even catch water!). It makes sense to compress the mornings at the expense of the more socially useful evenings and nights.
Finally, with this new timings, we can all go to sleep earlier than now, and will also be forced to wake up early. This is good, for as the saying goes, "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise!"
There is a good article on this by John Kay in the FT, We should turn the clocks forward, not back.
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