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Tired of Daylight Savings Time? A metric clock and metric calendar is the solution [1]

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Date: 2025-03-09

Here we go yet again, with yet another round of changing clocks for Daylight Savings Time, and, as usual, yet another round of griping, complaining and moaning about the bi-annual ritual of changing clocks with the usual round of people wanting to do away with it. And as usual, the problem is, no matter what you do it will create problems, and no matter what you do someone will be unhappy. Some want to leave it as-is, some want permanent DST, and some want permanent Standard Time.

But there is an alternate solution few talk about. In my story back in December on An Ultra-Rational Governmental Organization I discussed the possibility of metric time and a metric calendar (under the “Miscellaneous” section in my write-up). Back then, I didn’t explicitly think about it as a solution to the DST problem, though later in the comments in a response to seay459 it occurred to me that it could indeed be. This was in my story:

(WARNING!!! NERD ALERT!!!!!!!) All units of measurement shall be in metric: Not just length, area, temperature and mass but time as well: A year shall consist of 10 months: Five of 36 days each and five of 37 days each. Leap years shall add one day to the first month that contains 36 days, and that shall be a working day. Weeks shall consist of 6 days in the months with 36 days. Each week shall include 2 weekend days and 4 work days. In the months with 37 days, an extra weekend day shall be added to the last weekend of the month, otherwise, they too shall consist of weeks with 6 days. Every day shall have 10 hours; every hour shall have 100 minutes and every minute shall have 100 seconds. I said this was an ultra-rational system!!!! :-D

Due to the short weeks and generous proportion of weekend days, there shall be no more than 5 national holidays.

I have given this more thought and even created an entire new calendar. It is in the image for this story, above. You can right-click on it and select “Open in new tab” to see it a little bigger.

I made just a couple minor changes compared to what I thought of in my previous story. This scheme now features:

Every day would be 10 hours, every hour would have 100 minutes, every minute would have 100 seconds. As I noted in the comments in that story, if this metric time system was adopted, the length of each second would only change a little bit from the current system: Current time: 365 days/year x 24 hours/day x 60 minutes/hour x 60 seconds/minute = 31,536,000 seconds/year Metric time: 365 days/year x 10 hours/day x 100 minutes/hour x 100 seconds/minute = 36,500,000 seconds/year Not a big difference! Under this metric time system, the hours would be so long there would be little point in flipping them forward or backward an hour seasonally, it would be like “springing forward” or “falling back” by 2.4 (current system) hours twice a year. No way anyone would want to do that, people could instead just adjust their personal schedules a bit as the seasons change. It would work like this: Using a metric time converter, a typical 8am-5pm working day under the current time system would be like 3:30 to 7:00 metric time. If, during the warmer months, people wanted some “extra” daylight time after work is over, they could simply work from, say, 3:00 to 6:30. In fact, the ridiculousness of those who clamor for permanent DST is that you can do that now if you want! There is no real need for DST, you can change your own working hours if you insist. But that’s another story. The calendar would be 10 months. I have given them my own names in the calendar above (using a mixture of the current names, Latin, Esperanto and a bit of my own ideas). Five months would have 37 days, five months would have 36 days. Most weeks would have six days, but in the months with 37 days, the last week of the month would have seven days. On Leap Years an extra day would be added to the last month of the year. This would be nifty because it would extend the Holiday Season by a day on those years! A great feature of this calendar system would be, every day of every month would always fall on the same day of the week. That is, the 22nd of the month would always fall on a Wednesday. The 1st of the month would always fall on a Sunday. The 9th of the month would always fall on a Tuesday. And so on. After a while people would start to memorize this and you could talk to someone about meeting them on the 20th and they would automatically know it’s on a Monday. Another great feature about this calendar system is, every year (except Leap Years) would be exactly the same. You could literally re-use the same calendar every year. The only thing you’d need to do with these calendars is put some sort of asterisk-day on the last day (Leap Year day) of the year noting that this particular day only occurs on Leap Years. In all other years you would just ignore that particular day on your calendar. As I said in my previous story, due to the larger percentage of the week comprised of weekends, I have restricted the number of (US) holidays to just five: New Year’s, Memorial Day, Independence Day (no longer informally called “The Fourth of July”), Thanksgiving and Christmas. Independence Day and Christmas I have converted the current calendar dates to the new calendar. New Year’s is, of course, the same, and I have chosen Memorial Day to be the old May 22 (which is around where it usually falls on in the current calendar). Since Memorial Day is always supposed to be on a Monday, in this new system you could fix the date of the holiday and it would always be a Monday. Similarly, I fixed Thanksgiving to be Novem 17, which is the equivalent of the current November 4. It would still be on a “Thursday,” though I suppose that’s cheating a bit because “Thursday” in this new calendar would be the equivalent of “Friday” in most weeks in the current calendar. But I decided to put it earlier for the following reason: Halloween (Oct. 31 on the current calendar) in this new calendar would be Novem 13. So, if you put Thanksgiving on Novem 17, both would occur in the same week as Halloween. You could turn Halloween into a sort-of “Kid’s Feast” day, and then the point would be for kids to save the treats they collected on Halloween for their dessert after Thanksgiving dinner. The whole week could become a kind-of “Feast Week.” I also like the idea of having Thanksgiving a bit earlier in fall; for much of the nation, late November is getting a bit cold and is no longer really “fall” but getting more like winter. November 4 in the current calendar is a good compromise for autumnal vibes for most of the nation — trees will still mostly have colorful leaves up, the weather is getting crisp but not cold, etc. The only downside to this is that it would make “the Holiday Season” we think of as being between Thanksgiving and Christmas rather long. However, these days all the Christmas-y stuff tends to start up right after Halloween anyway, so as far as I’m concerned, you might as well go ahead and formalize it.

The issue with this, of course, would be getting the whole world to agree to implement it. Understandably, lots of people would complain about the logistics of converting everything to the new system. But I think if you gave everyone a, say, 10 or 20-year lead and had everyone agree that the new system would start on the first day of a certain year in the future, that would give everyone enough time to prepare a transition.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/9/2308892/-Tired-of-Daylight-Savings-Time-A-metric-clock-and-metric-calendar-is-the-solution?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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