{"id":4640,"date":"2013-03-28T18:50:45","date_gmt":"2013-03-28T17:50:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/?p=4640"},"modified":"2026-03-26T16:40:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T20:40:13","slug":"time-annoyance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/2013\/03\/28\/time-annoyance\/","title":{"rendered":"Time annoyance"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have ranted about the stupidity of daylight savings – messing with clocks unnecessarily – before<\/a>. Once again, it is the time of year when life is confusing. Normally, I am 6 or 8 hours ahead of many of my colleagues, as they are located in the Central and Pacific timezones in the US and I am in the UK. Since the US introduced the idea of messing with clocks earlier each Spring, I have to contend with the time difference being 5\/7 hours for a few weeks until we indulge in the practice, which we will do this coming weekend. I observe that, since I last wrote about this topic, Russia has abolished daylight savings. I was surprised to learn that my influenced reached that far East.<\/p>\n

Although messing with time is silly while stationary, when traveling it gets so much worse …<\/p>\n

Traveling across timezones is unnatural. I am not making a value judgment. It is just a fact – evolution did not prepare us for the experience. And yet we withstand it quite well. My mother-in-law [who is a very sprightly 80] recently traveled to Canada. Her trip there was a catalog of delays and complications. Once she got to Toronto [5 hours behind], she took the train across the country over a few days – and another 3 timezones – to end up in Vancouver, where she stayed for a couple of weeks. Her trip home was via Frankfurt – so another 9 hours forwards and 1 back – and that was fraught with even more delays and difficulties. She was glad to get home again and said that she was tired for the next couple of days. I am not sure that she believed me when I said that her experience would probably lay me low for a week.<\/p>\n

I have never found a really effective cure for jet lag. It is generally felt that the human body adjusts its internal clock about 1 hour for each day in a new timezone. This means that, on a trip to the US West coast, it takes me about a week to get in synch. Normally that coincides with my travel home. When I get home, another week is needed to adjust back again. However, on a recent US trip, I may have found the answer …<\/p>\n

My idea to avoid jet lag was to simply not adjust my internal clock. On a visit to California, I tried it out. I would get up at about 03:00 [my body thinks it is having a lie-in] and go out for breakfast. I would then do a bit of work and have another breakfast at about 08:00 [my body thinks it is having a late lunch]. I would proceed with the rest of my day, having lunch [my body thinks it is dinner] as normal. Then I would go to bed at about 6:00 in the evening. This meant that I did very little socializing and did not really have that much sleep. But the result was that I arrived home tired, but not jet lagged.<\/p>\n

It just occurred to me that this approach is exactly the same philosophy as I take to daylight savings. I adjusted my lifestyle, not my clock.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have ranted about the stupidity of daylight savings – messing with clocks unnecessarily – before. Once again, it is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71677,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spanish_translation":"","french_translation":"","german_translation":"","italian_translation":"","polish_translation":"","japanese_translation":"","chinese_translation":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[302],"industry":[],"product":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-4640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-off-topic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71677"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10157,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4640\/revisions\/10157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4640"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=4640"},{"taxonomy":"product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product?post=4640"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}