Most Canadians set their clocks back an hour on Sunday – “falling back” to standard time until Daylight Saving Time, also known as Daylight Saving Time, returns in March.

New research from the University of Oregon finds that the annual practice of “jumping forward” to the time of day affects productivity more than previously thought.

Glen Waddell is a labor economist at the University of Oregon and co-author of the new research in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. He says that rather than affecting productivity for a day or two, the DST adjustment can affect workers for up to two weeks.

Wadell and his colleague Andrew Dickinson examined the daily work activity of more than 174,000 people who used the GitHub cloud platform during the transition to daylight saving time from 2013 to 2019.

“When we look at the day, hour by hour, we are able to see that workers get off to a rough start early in the morning and try to make up for lost productivity throughout the afternoon. This has been happening for over two weeks,” Waddell said.

Publicly available GitHub recordings allowed researchers to examine worker activity down to the second. They said GitHub doesn’t represent all workers, but the research provides insight into the effect of the time change on productivity.

Researchers found different results when they studied the return to standard time in the fall.

“We actually see an improvement in productivity early in the morning, between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m., with the extra sleep likely being the reason,” Waddell said.

Not all Canadians change their time in November and March. Both Saskatchewan and Yukon stay on standard time throughout the year. US lawmakers are considering abandoning the annual time change. In 2021, the U.S. Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act to end the return to standard time from November to March.

An estimated 1.6 billion people in 75 countries switch to daylight saving time each spring and return to standard time in the fall.

Daylight saving time was introduced in 1916 as a way to save energy and was quickly adopted by many Western countries. The research paper states that consensus opinion estimates the savings to be minimal, on the order of plus or minus one percent.

“Our research results could be interpreted as yet another reason to leave this clock-switching experiment behind,” Waddell said. “If we were hesitant before, maybe this is just another push toward eliminating this practice.”