What is daylight savings time?

Depending on which country you live in, you might use daylight savings time up to twice a year. Shifting your watches and clocks forward by an hour in Spring, or backwards by an hour in Fall. Where the common saying derives - “Spring forward, Fall back”. 

Daylight savings is country dependent for two reasons. Firstly, it makes more sense to use in certain countries compared to others. Secondly, legislation. Countries are free to decide themselves if they want to shift their clocks back and forth by an hour throughout the year. 

Daylight savings time is used in order to optimize the amount of sunlight hours we have in our working days. Dating back to the times when humans relied primarily on agriculture, having an extra hour of sunlight in the evenings meant more productive hours, higher yields and greater income. Today this doesn't translate so effectively into an office set-up, however we still utilize the tool in order to get an extra hour of light in the evenings in geographical locations relatively north, such as Europe, the Nordics and USA

Countries that are located around or near the equator or the tropics lines dont have to worry as much about DST as much as others do. The reason being is that countries located in this area don’t have as drastic deviations in their natural light hours between seasons, relative to countries much more south or north of the equator.  

In the 21st century, an extra hour of light in the evening helps with productivity in the last hour or two of office work, gives families the opportunity to spend more quality time outdoors with each other and is arguably better for our environment due to less power usage when people come home from work and school. Thousands of years of reliance on the sun has possibly made its impact somewhere deep in our human DNA to be more active in daylight hours, making it much more appealing to sleep the dark hours away and be more productive in light. 

If you are unsure if your country uses daylight savings time, or are interested in which others do, refer to the map below: 

Daylight Saving Time map. By https://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst/2019.html

If you would like to know how to adjust the time or moonphase complication on your Tidal Moonphase, we’ve created the below instructional video for you: 

VIDEO TO BE POSTED IN DECEMBER 2019