'An hourly analysis that the belief in 'one or two days of decline' likely fails to capture the full economic, personal, or potential social costs induced by DST'
“Falling back” or “springing forward” into daylight saving time (DST) affects productivity far more than previously thought, according to a recent report.
“It is clear from an hourly analysis that the belief in ‘one or two days of decline’ likely fails to capture the full economic, personal, or potential social costs induced by (DST),” reads part of a new report posted in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
In fact, the change in time causes workers to lose productivity for about two weeks, say University of Oregon labour economist Glen Waddell and his colleague Andrew Dickinson in their research paper.
“In the two weeks following transitions to DST, we find significant declines in worker activity in early work hours, between 8am and 10am. That daily measures of productivity evidence significant declines for such a short period of time suggests that the slow morning hours in the data are made up for with increases in activity elsewhere in the work day.”
“However, increases in activity tend not to cluster in particular hours of the day. Rather, the data are consistent with workers recovering from morning productivity declines without a common strategy for dealing with the transition.”
There are several factors that are leading to the productivity slump that Canada has been experiencing since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to experts from TD Economics.
‘Getting off a bumpy start’
The researchers from the University of Oregon looked at the daily work activity of more than 174,000 people who used the cloud-based platform GitHub during the transition to daylight savings time from 2013 to 2019.
"When we look inside the day, hour by hour, we're actually able to see patterns of workers getting off to a bumpy start in the early morning and trying to make up for their lost productivity throughout the rest of the afternoon, and this is happening for upwards of two weeks," Waddell said, according to a CTV News report.
Motivated by potential energy savings, DST was introduced in 1916 and widely adopted by many Western countries soon after. The shifting forward of the clock increased the availability of natural light in the evenings.
Overall, one in two Canadians have experienced disruption to their sleep schedule when the clocks move forward for DST, causing stress, confusion and silly mistakes, according to a previous report from Sleep Country Canada.
And many workers are struggling to sleep well, according to a previous report from the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Insurance.
