Here's a cute one I couldn't recommend more... sleep above everything else (ish, anyway)

The competing demands for leisure and business on the one hand, and of our body clocks on the other, have not gone away over the ensuing century. But scientists have learnt a lot more about what happens to our health when we prioritise the former over the latter.

In short: nothing good. Many researchers now agree that daylight saving time can interfere with our circadian rhythms. But there are much more dangerous ways to meddle with our biological clocks, the worst of which is to work at night.

Even if you don’t work overnight, evidence suggests that just working against your “chronotype” can be bad for your health. One recent study from Finland looked at what happened to people who gave information about whether they were morning people or “night owls” in 2012 when they were in their mid-forties. Over the following 12 years, those with evening chronotypes were more likely to end up on disability pensions, even after adjusting for socio-economic factors. One possibility, according to the researchers, is that “traditional working times interfere significantly with the sleeping preferences of late chronotypes, leading to social jet lag”.

I agree passionately with this. If I have to set an alarm, it's a bad day.

While this columnist turns it into a class-based privilege of certain types of work, I see the causality running the other way. Sleep, especially in the morning, is so vital to well-being that it's the first thing we — who can — trade off. Owning your time over everything else.

Secondly, all the other bullshit, made-up schedules — like kindergarten or school teaching starts at 7 or whatever — are pure choices that we can do away with tomorrow. Retarded. (I went to a high school which, to its massive credit, understood this nocturnal/late-night, late-rising tendency of teenagers well, and had classes start at 10 am or midday. Nobody cares that you're staying at school til 4-5-6 in the afternoon.)

Plenty of other bullshit office work (yes, schools and teaching is bullshit, sorry all you great teachers out there; abolish immediately!) can change their routines and meetings with a literal click of a button: generalize later working hours so people can sleep instead.

FINALLY, this being the establishment TDS Financial Times, of course they must finish on an anti-Trump rant

Yet US President Donald Trump sounds much more like a voice from the past. His latest intervention into the “politics of time” is to push for daylight saving time to be made permanent, arguing that it would be good for people who would “like to play golf a little bit without having to run home after 14 holes”.

Yeah, sure I mean that's not the reason; you should abolish the switching of the clocks twice a year... Not for the benefits of the golfers but the unnecessary inconvenience for everyone else.

But the problem isn't that, which Nate Silver's great read (#935939, #909292) taught me last year. Instead, it's the outdated scheduling practices we employ in business and working life in general. If we can just shift those around first and/or in tandem, the rationale for abolishing daylight savings time goes away.

Yes, sun is fantastic and we ought to maximize the time we're awake to it and be around it. In places like Alaska — or Iceland — we don't do that shit, because in winter there's not enough sun that no amount of chronometric fiddling will achieve anything, and in summer we have more sun than we can make use of anyway.