How often do you wish you had one extra hour in your day? Ah, all the things you could do with 60 minutes more! More chilling, more working, more playing with your child—maybe you’d actually get around to cooking without feeling in a rush!
But wait… What if I told you that you already do get that extra hour? At least if you’re in one of the 70 or so countries which change their clocks twice a year. In Germany, we switch from Daylight Savings Time back to Central European Time every last Sunday of October. That means at 3 AM, the clocks spool back 60 minutes, and voilà, we’re back to 2 AM. How miraculous! And yet…
Take yesterday morning. Said day had once again arrived. Under the new clock regimen, my partner and I woke up at 7:30 AM. Wow! So much time! We followed the same routine from the day before: reading in bed, getting up, doing some chores or a quick workout, then making breakfast. I bought fresh bread rolls, whipped up some omelettes, and we ate. We played video games for two hours, and…what?! It was 2 PM—the exact same time we started working on some of our to-dos the day before!
You know how easy it is to lose an hour, don’t you? It’s always hard to tell where it went after the fact. Was it an information rabbit hole on Wikipedia that we fell down? Did a certain task take us longer than usual? Or did we pass an extra 30 minutes while sitting on the can?
Whichever cracks the sands of time fall into, if you appreciate how easily 60 minutes can slip by during your daily routines, well, there’s no day like the last Sunday of October to remember: Even if you had an extra hour every day, you’d still never have enough time. I guess we’ll both just have to make do with the 24 hours we’ve got—and perhaps those are all we ever needed to begin with.
