New Zealanders are about to lose an hour of sleep and the twice-yearly ritual of changing our clocks has a surprisingly strange history, reports Mava Moayyed.
At 2am next Sunday, September 27, New Zealanders will move their clocks forward an hour.
That means one less hour in bed and potentially a few days of disrupted sleep as our body clocks catch up, and we try and figure out how to change the clock on the oven and the car.
Daylight saving explained - Watch on TVNZ+
And for some people, changing the time is a much bigger job.
Jamie McKinnon is a clockmaker and the owner of the Precision Watch Company in Auckland. He looks after more than 100 clocks in his shop.
"There's hundreds of them, just hundreds," he says.
It’s also his job to change 22 public clocks around Auckland and Northland.
"You've got to climb clock towers and get access behind walls. That's an interesting part of the job," Jamie says.
And when Daylight Saving ends in April, he'll have to do it all again.
So why do we do it?
The idea is to make better use of summer sunlight giving us lighter evenings for barbecues, sport, shopping and recreation.
By pushing the clocks forward, an hour of daylight that would have happened in the early morning is effectively shifted into the evening, when people are more likely to be awake and using it.
But there has long been a debate over whether the benefits are worth the disruption.
Losing an hour can have consequences
Changing the clocks might sound harmless, but there is evidence the transition can affect our health and safety.
Research has linked the start of daylight saving with increased health risks, including heart attacks and strokes.
And a 2020 University of Auckland study found significantly more road accident claims occurred during the first two days after the daylight saving begins.
The issue is partly about sleep.
Our bodies don't instantly adjust because the clock on the wall has changed. For some people, the lost hour can mean several days of disrupted sleep and altered routines.
That has led some countries to abandon the practice altogether.
Russia, Turkey, Brazil, Mexico and Samoa are among those that have recently ditched the practice.
But New Zealand is sticking with it.
Whose idea was Daylight Saving?
Part of the answer can be traced back to a Kiwi.
In 1895, New Zealand entomologist George Hudson proposed shifting the clocks during summer.
Hudson worked shifts at the post office and wanted more daylight after work so he could pursue his passion for collecting insects.
A decade later, English builder William Willett promoted a similar idea, arguing that changing the clocks could also reduce the amount of artificial lighting people needed.
The first countries to change the clocks
One of the first places in the world to actually implement daylight saving was Port Arthur in Canada, in 1908.
Germany became the first whole country to adopt it in 1916, during World War I, partly to conserve fuel.
New Zealand followed in 1927.
But our version of daylight saving has been anything but consistent.
The dates changed, and at one point the shift was only half an hour.
Then, during wartime, daylight saving was extended to operate year-round. Eventually, it disappeared altogether.
It wasn't until 1975 that the system we recognise today became established.
Then, in 2007, the daylight saving period was extended after about 42,000 New Zealanders had signed a petition arguing that longer summer evenings were good for recreation and tourism.
And that's how we ended up with daylight saving covering more than half the year.
It's not for the farmers
One of the most persistent myths about daylight saving is that it was designed to help farmers.
Bu farmers have historically been among its critics and it's not hard to see why.
Farming schedules are closely tied to daylight and the natural rhythms of livestock, meaning a change on the clock doesn't necessarily change when work needs to happen, it just complicates it.
Put simply: cows don't care what time it is. Milk time is milk time.
In fact, one Northland dairy settlement became so frustrated with the clock change that it effectively created its own time zone.
In 1984, residents of Ararua adopted what became known as "Ararua Time", refusing to follow the official clock.
The experiment was short-lived, but it remains one of the strangest examples of New Zealand's long-running argument over what time it should be.
Which countries do Daylight Saving?
If you've always assumed changing the clocks is something everyone around the world does, think again.
Only around 70 countries observe daylight saving.
Europe is mostly on board, while the United States observes it almost everywhere except Hawaii and most of Arizona.
Australia is split.
New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory change their clocks.
Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory don't.
Most of Asia, Africa and South America don't observe daylight saving either and the list of countries opting out has grown.
In the United States, the debate continues, including proposals to make Daylight Saving Time permanent and eliminate the twice-yearly clock change.
So why don't we just stop?
That's the question at the heart of the Daylight Saving debate.
There are arguments for keeping it: longer summer evenings, more opportunities for outdoor recreation and potential benefits for tourism and businesses.
There are also arguments against it, particularly around sleep disruption, health and road safety.
And even if New Zealand decided to stop changing the clocks, there would still be another question to answer: Which time should we keep?
Permanent summertime would mean lighter evenings but darker winter mornings.
Permanent standard time would mean earlier winter sunrises, but less daylight in the evening during summer.
There is no way to create more sunlight by changing the clock.
For now, New Zealand has chosen to keep moving it. So don’t forget to ‘spring forward’ on September 27.
Daylight saving explained - Watch on TVNZ+
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