The most productive week of the year
By STEVE HONEYWELL
Honeywell: Arguably, my favorite day of the year is the one during which we turn the clocks back an hour for that extra bit of time. I look forward to turning my clock back every year from the day I turn them forward until that day arrives. It’s not so much the extra hour of time that I want, but the next couple of days or weeks that make everything feel later than it really is.
Why do I like that? Because for those few short weeks, I feel like I’m ahead of the game. Since I generally feel like I’m behind on getting things done, any feeling that I’m ahead of schedule is, at least psychologically, a good thing. And as midterm gets closer and closer to me, even a little psychological pick-me-up can make the difference between getting my work done and staying up at night worrying.
Beyond that, I also enjoy when it gets dark earlier as much as I may dislike the colder weather. This is also purely psychological for me, and has to do with my working at night. I don’t feel bad about spending four hours in a classroom at night when it’s already dark outside. During the summer, I feel trapped inside the classroom. When it’s dark at 6 p.m. or earlier, part of me thinks I wasn’t going to be outside anyway, so it doesn’t really matter if I’m inside or not. That’s purely psychological, because I don’t tend to spend a lot of time outside anyway.
So, for a variety of reasons, I feel like this is the most productive week of my year. It’s the week when I at least feel like I’m getting more done than at any other time. In the spring, the opposite happens for me, when I always feel like I’m under the gun.
It’s happening at a good time for me this year as well. If I ever needed a week with an extra hour in it, it was this week. I already feel like I’ve done more than I did in the previous week, and there’s still a few days to go.
There’s a part of me that wishes we never turned the clocks forward, that we just set them back an hour every year. Ridiculous, I know, because in a decade that would mean we’d be waking up in total darkness and sleeping when the sun came up. But there’s also a part of me that wouldn’t mind that so much. I’m a little envious of places in the world that have darkness for extended periods of time.
As much as I may hate setting the clocks forward in the spring, I suppose it’s actually worth it. After all, if we didn’t set the clocks ahead an hour, there’d be no way to fully understand the joy of walking around the house and turning them all back an hour. That pleasure is far more than the annoyance of losing an hour. And anyway, I don’t have to lose that hour for a few months.
• Steve Honeywell is a father and sometime stay-at-home dad. He teaches English composition at Kishwaukee College and is a freelance writer and proofreader.
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