You just changed your clock ahead of schedule. That’s all. 
…and that’s the problem.
As a society, we are in the habit of (for example) “get up at 6, start work at 8:30…” regardless of the season.
If society could handle something like “well, in December, I get up around 7 and start work around 9:30, while in June I usually get up about 5, and start work at 7:30…”, there’d be no need for jumping the clocks forward or having them fall back.
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I know you realize that is asking way too much, but I think a significant number of us office workers could probably manage to do just that.
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lol…“I can only handle really big changes, not small ones” is not quite the convincing argument you think it is. 
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Eh, people bring this up every March, but when you have meetings and church and volunteer activities and kids who are in school and who also have after-school activities … it’s not so easy to just change schedules.
Choir practice is 7:30 - 9:00 PM, Gymnastics is 6:15 - 7:45 PM, and Mini Me’s school bus is going to come at 8:19 AM no matter what I do. By the time I get home from choir practice she has to go to bed immediately and there’s JUST enough time for her to get a proper amount of sleep before getting up for school. We can’t just refuse to shift the hour without giving up the things that we enjoy.
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If enough people were willing to shift their schedules rather than shifting the clock, this would work itself out.
A common argument raised to justify time changes is the threat of kids having to go to/from school in the dark. If schools varied their schedules to address that concern (in lieu of changing the clock itself), the rest of society would likely adjust.
It’s not going to happen – some people have near religious fervor that they must get up at x o’clock, and that it must generally be (a certain day/night status) at that hour, etc.; and there would be inconvenience and confusion along the lines of “how am I going to remember what school/business hours are this month”.
I still think it’d be much better to compromise, stop the time changes, and just use the half-hour between standard and DST year-round.
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I think year-round standard time solves that problem just fine. In many parts of the country year-round DST might cause this to be a problem. But changing the clocks doesn’t help this problem… the kids need to go to school sufficiently late in winter for this to be acceptable by local standards. Making it an hour later in summer is unnecessary.
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Maybe we should have eight time zones?
My preferred solution would be year-round standard time. This would be the second best option.
For a fun exercise with your favorite calculating/modeling tool…it’d be a fun exercise to define a set of criteria (e.g. “it should be dark at 5am”, “it should be light at 7am”, “it should be dark at 10pm”, “indifferent as to whether it should be light or dark at 6am”, etc.), and calculate the optimal time zone and whether there should be seasonal time change for the various cities/media markets around North America, given a formula dug up somewhere to calculate sunrise/sunset times given latitude and longitude, such that the error vs those criteria is minimized.
Yeah, but a lot of the Time Zone demarcations are why they are more because the big city nearby is in “X” Time Zone and the little town nearby wanted to be on the same Time Zone.
Big cities on state borders want to be on the same Time Zone as that other state. Etc.
And there seems to be an overwhelming tie amongst people who prefer Standard or Daylight times in any given area of any size.
You know what is easier for people in charge? Doing nothing and receiving the same number of complaints, only they can be answered with “The guys before me did this!” instead of making a change and being the target of ire.
My kids have a shorter school day than my work day, so something is going to give on either side, or both, but do agree that kids/school reduce a lot of time flexibility.
I was thinking that most offices have a wide enough dispersion of schedules in general that you could have an average start/end time that could easily float with the time change.
That’s why you do the exercise on a by media market basis. Start with a constraint that time zone boundaries should not split Nielsen’s TV markets, as a proxy of suburbs/small towns wanting to observe the same time as “their” larger city.
Obviously, that doesn’t do anything about the problems created by
- Atlanta wanting to be in the same time zone as New York City;
- The LP of Michigan wanting to be in the same time zone as Detroit which wants to be in the same time zone as Cleveland;
- Odessa wanting to be in the same time zone as Dallas;
…etc., etc. But those arbitrary wishes are why our time zone boundaries are so screwed up as compared to society’s expectations about day vs night aligning with specific numbers on the clock.
I can sit here in my armchair, opining on various ways that schedules can be aligned with seasonal shifts in sunrise/sunset. That’s easy. However, resolving the irrational constraints that people impose in addition to common preferences…that is probably impossible, and is why we will probably continue to change our clocks twice a year, despite how annoying so many of us find doing so.
At least these days, many/most timepieces are smart enough to change themselves.
The time change problem has largely gone away for me since retirement. I wake and get up around the time it starts getting light outside.
But I’d prefer we not do time change.
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When it was just me I did do that to some extent… come in later in the summer and earlier in the winter. But there’s too many moving parts now. And even then I was still constrained by my own non-work activities as well as meetings. I maybe only shifted my life 40 minutes instead of the whole hour. Now I’m basically stuck shifting the whole hour.
This happens, but it’s not the only issue. The little corner of Indiana that is suburban Chicago keeps the same schedule as Chicago, and back when Indiana mostly didn’t observe DST, the little corner that was suburban Cincinnati did to stay consistent with Cincinnati.
But that doesn’t explain the fact that the entire state of Indiana and probably half of Ohio and the entire upper peninsula of Michigan should all be on central time, and a lot of other vast sections of the country are also in the wrong time zone.
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I was surprised to learn that Tennessee is on central time…at least part of it
I should hope so. It touches the Missississississippi River.
Most of it is on Central.
Most of KY is on Eastern.
All of MI is on Eastern, even the UP which has parts that are west of some parts of WI.
Show me on this map where Tennessee touched you.
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When I actually look at a map I can see why it’s in the central. I’m pretty dumn when it comes to geography.