From the Editor’s Desk: Less Time (Premium)

We’re in Mexico for much of this month, a bit of bad timing given everything that’s going on in our lives, most notably that we’re selling our house. But that’s how it goes: you can’t control how life converges on you sometimes. All you can do is run with it. And, optionally, stress over it. Which is pointless.

This trip is interesting to my wife and me because it’s a test run for the future, though I feel like a lot of our trips are test runs. That is, we’re not here to sightsee at all, but are rather just working and living in our apartment normally to see what that looks like. Given our past experiences, I’m not surprised to say it’s going well. Indeed, I seem unusually productive on these trips. And that’s even more true when we’re not running out for part of the day doing touristy things.

I’ve written in the past about how my home swap schedule was ideal. On these trips, usually for three weeks and almost always in Europe, we would play against the time change—usually 5 or 6 hours ahead of back home—to be out doing things mid-day while I’d split my work activities between the morning and the late afternoon, when the people I worked with the States were just getting to work. These were always very productive experiences.

But Mexico might be even better. This place is a bit different because it’s only been a one-hour time change compared to back home, and the flight here doesn’t require an uncomfortable overnight experience where I don’t sleep well or even at all, ruining the next day or so. Instead, you get off the plane, deal with passport control, get to the apartment in about 20 minutes, and hit the ground running. It’s a nice advantage.

But that advantage was subtly undercut by an unforeseen development: late last year, Mexico enacted a law in which most of the country now ignores Daylight Saving Time (DST). And so they do not “spring forward” each March or “fall back” each November as before, and as the United States still does. This means that between March and November, the time change between here and back is now two hours, not one.

It doesn’t sound like a big deal, and mostly it isn’t. But it impacts the start of my work day, where 8 am here is (was) 9 am back home; now 7 am here is 9 am. And because Brad and I always record First Ring Daily at 9 am ET—and the people I work with are largely getting started at that time—things are a little weird. I can’t be sitting in front of a microphone and camera at 7. I need an hour before that happens, ideally, when I can drink a bit of coffee and read the news, and basically ease into the day. But it’s dark(ish) here at 6 am. That’s not happening.

Fortunately, Brad was nice enough to alter the schedule for the remainder of this trip, and we’ll figure something out in the future when this happens again. But no matter how much time goes by, I find myself endlessly fascinated by this kind of thing. By time, I guess.

On a related note, Richard Campbell is co-hosting Windows Weekly now, and he still travels in a way that makes me seem like a stay-at-home dad by comparison. He was in different parts of New Zealand over the last two weeks (and episodes), and two weeks ago I asked about the time difference. He called it “one day plus four hours” (I think), which I found funny, like he was on Mars or something. But whatever the literal difference, it’s an incredible thing that we can be on opposite sides of the planet and still interact in real time.

It reminds me of when we were in Europe for home swaps each summer. I’d record Windows Weekly each week from whatever home we were in, and for most of them, the sun would go down during the show so that it was light at the beginning and almost comically dark by the time we finished. I know, I could have put on lights. But I always enjoyed that effect: the show occurs from about 2 pm to 4:30 pm when I’m home, so even in the winter it’s always light.

Here in Mexico City, the sun comes up suddenly and then stays in the sky for almost exactly 12 hours. In the summer, you get another hour and 20 minutes of daylight, I guess, thanks to this location’s proximity to the equator, it’s not a major difference. It’s no Stockholm, Sweden, that’s for sure: during our home swap there, the sun was up by 4:00 am and didn’t set until almost 11:00 pm, and we had light for longer than that. Incredible.

And then there’s the passage of time. Thanks to my general compulsiveness, I mark the time in odd ways. I wear contact lenses, for example, and they come in sheets of five, and in boxes of 30, and I lay out each strip as I take them out of the box. I just used up the last contacts in a strip, the second time I’ve done so since we arrived. I have two more strips to get through and then a straggler or two before we go home. And that’s how I know how far we are into this trip.

Goofy, I know. But we’re about halfway there.