Daylight savings can negatively affect worker productivity, research says

Emergency wait times in a Collingwood hospital will be posted online. (Pressmaster | Dreamstime.com)

Most Canadians turned their clocks back an hour on Sunday – “falling back” into standard time until daylight saving time, also known as daylight savings time, returns in March.

New research from the University of Oregon finds the annual practice of “springing forward” into daylight time affects productivity more than previously thought.

Glen Waddell is a University of Oregon labour economist and co-author of the new research in the Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization. He says rather than affecting productivity for a day or two, the adjustment to daylight saving time can affect workers for up to two weeks.

Wadell and his colleague, Andrew Dickinson, looked at the daily work activity of more than 174,000 people who used the cloud-based platform GitHub during the transition to daylight saving 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.

Publicly available GitHub records allowed researchers to examine worker activity down to the second. They said GitHub doesn’t represent all workers, but the research provides insight into the effect of the time change on productivity.

Researchers found different results when they studied the return to standard time in the fall.

"We actually see a picking up of productivity in those early morning hours, 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., with the extra sleep being the likely reason," Waddell said.

Not all Canadians change their clocks in November and March. Saskatchewan and the Yukon both remain on standard time through the year. U.S. lawmakers are considering abandoning the yearly time change. In 2021, the U.S. Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act to end the return to standard time from November to March.

An estimated 1.6 billion people in 75 countries change to daylight time each spring and change back to standard time in the fall.

Daylight time was introduced in 1916 as a means of saving energy and soon adopted by many Western countries. The research paper said that consensus opinion finds the savings minimal, on the order of plus or minus one per cent.

"Our research findings could be interpreted as yet more reason to put this clock-switching experiment behind us," Waddell said. "If we were fence-sitters before, maybe this is just another nudge toward the direction of doing away with this practice."