For the first time in nineteen years of fieldwork, my study participants did not notice March. I had to tell them it had occurred.
A Civic Proposal · Temporal Policy Reform
Spring forward.
Slowly.
Daylight Smearings Time distributes the annual one-hour clock change across fourteen days — 2.98 milliseconds per second — so that no one, anywhere, ever experiences 2:00 a.m. twice. Or not at all. The hour still arrives. It arrives the way dawn does: gradually.
11,432 citizens have pledged
§ 01
The clock should never startle you.
Twice a year, by statute, hundreds of millions of people are subjected to a one-hour temporal discontinuity — administered without anesthetic, at 2:00 a.m., on a weekend. The clinical literature on what follows is consistent, peer-reviewed, and largely ignored.
+24%
Heart attacks
Increase in acute myocardial infarction admissions the Monday after the spring transition.1 The heart, it turns out, was not consulted.
+6%
Fatal traffic accidents
Rise in fatal crashes during the week following the spring change.2 An hour of sleep, removed by legislation, is still an hour of sleep.
4m 17s
The alternative
Maximum daily adjustment under Daylight Smearings Time. Roughly the time it takes to steep a cup of tea. The body does not file a complaint.
§ 02
One hour. Fourteen days. Zero events.
Daylight Smearings Time keeps daylight saving time. We are not abolitionists. We object only to its delivery mechanism. The hour is not removed; it is administered in 1,209,600 doses of 2.98 milliseconds each — one per second, around the clock, below the threshold of human perception.
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The smear begins quietly
Fourteen days before the legacy transition date, clocks begin to drift toward the new hour at 2.98 milliseconds per second — a rate the human nervous system cannot register, administered while you are doing something else.
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Each day absorbs its share
Every day carries 4 minutes and 17 seconds of the change. Sunrise, meetings, and milking schedules glide. Nothing is skipped. Nothing is repeated.
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The old clocks leap. Ours are already there.
At 2:00 a.m. on the legacy transition date, the smear completes — at the exact moment unsmeared clocks lurch a full hour to catch up. We will be asleep, continuously.
“When a leap second was added on December 31, 2016, the world's largest computing infrastructure did not stop its clocks for one second. It stretched the surrounding twenty hours by 0.0014% instead. Nothing crashed. Nobody noticed. That was the point.”
§ 03
Your devices already live this way.
Smearing is not speculative. It is the established industry practice for absorbing time discontinuities — we merely propose extending it to the largest discontinuity of all.
- ✓Leap seconds have been smeared since 2008. Major cloud providers stretch each leap second across the surrounding hours on millions of servers, in production, twice a decade, without incident.
- ✓Your phone already adjusts itself constantly. Consumer devices synchronize to network time many times a day, absorbing small corrections you have never once perceived. We propose one more.
- ✓One published table, total compatibility. The smear schedule is a deterministic function — publishable as a standard timezone entry. Calendars, trains, and exchanges follow it the way they follow everything else: automatically.
§ 04
Voices of the continuously rested.
Households, farms, and server fleets in our voluntary pilot program have lived on smeared time through four consecutive transitions. Their testimony is reproduced unedited.
We have been smearing leap seconds in production since 2011. Smearing an hour is not a technical problem. It is a courage problem.
The cows never agreed to daylight saving. Under smearing, milking moves four minutes a day. The herd has registered no objection, and I have learned to read them carefully.
The Monday after the spring change used to be our worst attendance day of the year. Now there is no Monday after. There is only a gentle two weeks.
§ 05
Anticipated objections.
Is this the same as abolishing daylight saving time?
No. We are not abolitionists. We support daylight saving time and the evening light it provides. We object only to its abruptness. The hour may move; it may not lunge.
What happens at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday of March?
2:01 a.m., like any other day.
Will my meetings still start on time?
Your meetings will start at the smeared time, which is the time. Your calendar already receives its time from a network source that we would simply inform of the schedule. You will continue to be three minutes late for reasons of your own.
Isn't fourteen days arbitrary?
No. The fourteen-day schedule was adopted by the Institute's Committee on Re-entrainment Standards following a meta-analysis of 41 published phase-shift studies. The governing criterion — Technical Memorandum No. 7, §4.2, Maximum Imperceptible Drift — caps daily adjustment at one half of the natural day-to-day variability of the human circadian period (±8.6 minutes). At 4 minutes 17 seconds per day, the fourteen-day smear operates at a 2.0× margin below the perceptibility threshold, while aligning the administration window with one full semilunar cycle, the interval to which intertidal organisms have entrained for roughly 400 million years. Shorter schedules failed the perceptibility criterion. Longer schedules were deemed indulgent.
Public Comment Period · Bulletin No. 14
The hour is coming. Let it come gently.
Add your name to the petition for a fourteen-day smear standard. We will write to you only when the cause requires it, which is less often than you would think.
11,432 citizens on the rolls
✓ Recorded. Your signature has been entered into the rolls with a timestamp
that will remain meaningful under either system. Welcome to the gentle two weeks.
No spam. No sharp transitions. Unsubscribing takes effect gradually over fourteen days.