Sunday, March 9, 2014

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Daylight Savings Time

I woke up on this, the ugliest calendar-imposed-lack-of-sleep mornings feeling great.  No -- even better than that.  I'm going with "excellent".  And I was commiserating with friends last night about how this "spring forward" things sucks.  And despite that, I accidentally stumbled into the secret combination to make "losing an hour sleep" work for you.

First, sleep in.  Get a little extra sleep over your typical workday.  Since I've been getting about 5 hours sleep a night (or less) for the past many months, getting more than this wasn't a problem.  I've also been trying to sleep in a little on the weekends to make up for particular arduous, sleep-deprived weekdays.  I ended up getting about 9 hours last night, which was a critical part of this whole "feeling good in the AM" thing.

Second, get an Internet-connected alarm clock.  A smartphone will work here, but I happen to use a now-discontinued-and-out-of-business Chumby.  This is important for two reasons:

  1. You never have to go through the depressing "I've got to set my clock forward and this is going to suck in the morning" ritual right before falling asleep, and 
  2. When you wake up in the morning and look at your clock, you think you've gotten even more sleep than you expected because it automatically reset the time when it was supposed to.  Having a poor memory doesn't hurt here at all.

So about two hours after I woke up, my oldest started making his way around the house resetting clocks, and wasn't until then that I remembered I'd lost an hour, but I was already up, productive, and feeling good before it could slow me down.  And now I'm pumped that I beat Daylight Savings Time!

A good night's sleep FTW!