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Subscribe to RSSDST and daylight savings were trending Monday on Twitter, and the theme of many of the tweets had to do with workers’ difficulties adjusting to the time switcheroo.
“Ugh. It is seriously demoralizing to have to go to work in the dark again. Curse you, DST!” tweeted @woyce, a sentiment that summed up emotion about the day.
Many employees are feeling out of sorts and tired because the clocks have sprung ahead an hour, and that’s going to impact productivity; as witnessed by the plethora of workers spending time tweeting about their hatred of DST instead of working.
Making matters worse is the commencement of office pools this week for March Madness, the NCAA Men’s division basketball championship, that is also expected to be an employee time sink.
It’s the perfect storm of non-productivity.
A recent study by Penn State released found that daylight savings leads to more workers slacking off.
The time switch results in a loss of sleep and an uptick in web surfing, maintained D. Lance Ferris, assistant professor of management and organization and Penn State’s Smeal College of Business. Ferris, along with other researchers, looked at six years of Google data and found that tired employees are more apt to make bad decisions.
“Using existing data that shows that people exhibit poorer self-control when they're tired, the researchers said that the lost sleep due to the time change -- an average of 40 minutes that Sunday night -- makes employees less likely to self-regulate their behavior and more inclined to spend time cyberloafing, or surfing the Internet for personal pursuits while on the clock,” according to a Penn State report on the research.
March Madness will likely contribute to the problem. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., predicted the basketball fever could attract more than 2.5 million visitors on the web per day, and each spending 90 minutes watching the games.
While John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, said the slacking off wouldn’t bring the economy down, he did estimate it could cost employers about $175 million in the first two full days of the basketball tournament.
“Monday could be particularly dreadful on the productivity front,” he noted.
Beyond March Madness and DST, there may be a general falling off of worker efficiency going on the United States.
A Wall Street Journal story Monday reported that Northwestern University professor Robert Gordon has found the productivity spike in 2009 after mass layoffs that made employees fearful of losing their jobs has fallen off. He said there were “clear signs everywhere” that productivity has hit the skids.
So maybe, March Madness and DST are just great excuses to sit back and kick up our heels even more.
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Oh no, costing employers $175 million, whatever shall they do? Maybe tap into the record profits they've been sitting on for the past year....yeah, that sounds about right.
What they should do is fire some lazy a//es.
"Four legs good, two legs bad!" ... and later on "Four legs good, two legs better!" ... welcome to Animal Farm ... now get to work or we will send you to the glue factory! Lol
what they shall do is to fire anyone with an attitude like yours.
I believe NOTHING in this article.
I hate these 'loss of productivity' articles. Just because some folks might be moving slow on Monday, or checking scores and reading March Madness articles more often doesn't mean that work or money is lost. These same workers might still have all of their work completed by Friday. I agree with you!
"“Ugh. It is seriously demoralizing to have to go to work in the dark again. Curse you, DST!” tweeted @woyce, a sentiment that summed up emotion about the day."
The clocks moved FORWARD not back so it would be lighter not darker.
Who wrote this, retards of america?
While I largely agree with your sentiments, you're forgetting that there's a large proportion of workers, who work nights.
You just nominated yourself president.
Its lighter of the evenings and darker of the mornings, so a worker that typically leaves at the break of daylight would be leaving in the dark this morning. What is 6am today, was 5am on Friday - hence, having to leave for work in the dark.
Banaschar- I leave the house at 7am each morning, which last week meant the sun was rising here in Texas. This morning it was pitch black at 7am. That's what this person meant. We're driving to work in the dark, rather than wearing sunglasses to shield our eyes from the rising sun. Geesh. Talk about retards.
You clearly shouldn't question other people's intelligence.
The whole idea of DST is shifting time so that the sun sets later and the days seem longer.
Instead of the sun setting at (for example) 7pm it sets at 8pm.
Since no one can magically make the sun stay in the sky an extra hour, this means sunRISE is also an hour later.
Consider this, you had to set your locks forward by one hour, or you would have been late to everything, right? You lose the hour... so 1pm becomes 2pm, etc. If you leave early enough in the morning for work, 6am just became 7am. The SUN didn't change when it rises, so when you walk out the door at 7am, it FEELS like 6am.
*clocks, not locks, obviously
It's way too funny when someone who doesn't undeerstand what he read call peoples retards.
Hmmm... I'd say that perhaps we should look at the intelligence level of some of those who are responding instead of the person who wrote the article.
Besides, didn't you learn that it's not nice to call names? (I do believe this is karma!)
um because it's dark in the early mornings. Go back to sleep, Banaschar.
Nice post, Banaschar. Since the clocks move forward, if you go to work early enough, it is now dark again..and light on the way home. Jeez!
"It is seriously demoralizing to have to go to work in the dark again”
First World problems.
yea really. People are so f-ing lazy. your job doesn't owe you anything, people.
I don't agree with the article either.
I wonder just how they calculate this anyway. And what if our productivity is dropping off. Employers laid people off but the work never went away. Some of us are seriously burnt out.
The rich get richer doing next to nothing and the middle class is making less yet working harder than ever. Who cares if there's an iota less productivity for a day or two?
Swordsman had better hope that he never finds out what it takes to become rich It's a long way from "doing nothing", but more like a 24 hour proposition. I am 100 percent sure that he will never have that problem.
Try working in the medical field where your hours shift from day to day. I've been saying this for years. Trying to save a few bucks here and there costs a lot in productivity. Not to mention all the mistakes that could be avoided.
I'm always a slacker. Now I have an excuse.
So many people wish they had a job, any job, any hours. Working hard at a job is much easier than working hard to find a job.
It's Daylight Saving Time, there's no "s" at the end of "Saving".
Are you serious? I was a nurse for many years, rotating shifts. If you can't handle a one hour change in schedule, you are pretty pathetic.
Slacking Off ?
I havn't seen a work week below 50 Hrs in over a year.
What kind of an article is this - Fiction?
If this chronic, I'll bet that the folks who are afflicted are eligible for SSI.
Maybe we are just getting tired of listening to the government telling us how wonderful everything is as the Federal Reserve and the banking cartel steal from the poor and give to the rich.
I think the whole DST thing is ridiculous. What does it really "save"? Nothing. The sun is still in the sky for the same number of hours, minutes and seconds. Leave it alone.
I always attributed it to the fact that the time from the holidays (Christmas/New Year) to Memorial Day is a long strech with no company time off. After May there is at least a holiday every other month that a lot of companies are closed.
DST stinks. Depending on where you live, that extra hour of wonderful sunshine equates to an extra hour of the AC running, etc. For me, everything fall and winter are the best. I get summer blues, not winder blues. And I'm not alone.
We are tired and abused and no one listens. If you work hard in this country all you do is get abused and have everything you built taken away from you. Why should workers care? The companies we work for don't care about anything but their own greed.
Life's been tough, eh? You want fairness? I'll pay for your ticket to Cuba!!!!
It's saddening to realize this nation is not progressing...
I just wish we had one time and stuck to it period. If schools have a problem then let them move the hours up or back one hour for a certain time of year.