How to Ease into the Spring Time Change

Three tips to protect your energy and focus during the transition

The spring time change hits differently than its fall counterpart. While we gain an extra hour of evening daylight, losing that precious morning hour can throw off our routines and energy levels for days.

Over-caffeinated, sleep-deprived, and harried people aren’t the best versions of themselves. The spring time change both intensifies people’s status quo and pushes some of us into it.

In 3–5 days, we’ll be adjusted to the new biological rhythms and it’ll be our new normal. That said, what we do in these 3–5 days can have consequences for the next 3–5 weeks or months.

Here’s how to make the transition smoother:

1. Treat the time change as a project for this week

A project is anything that takes time, energy, and attention. Since it’ll take us 3–5 days of transitioning, it counts as a week-sized project.

Even if the time change is a relative non-event for you, it’s a 😵‍💫 for a lot of people. The morning school circus for younger kids gets worse. Teenagers are even moodier and broodier. Commutes are worse.

By 9:30, people have done enough emotional labor and self-woosahing¹ to last them the rest of the day. That’s going to be in the mix of a lot of your interactions for the day and impact people's ability to focus on your collab projects.

If you count it as one of your five projects that’s going to displace something else and you’re wrong, you get some margin back. If you pretend like it’s not a thing, you’ll be compressed, frustrated, and unable to focus. One of these is clearly the better option. ☺️

2. Reschedule and unschedule as much as you can.

I get it: some events on your calendar are non-negotiable or much harder to move. Your boss or that hard-to-get medical appointment that you took PTO for are likely not worth messing with.

But there’s a lot of other stuff that you may be able to move around, especially getting them out of the morning blocks. Do you really need to do that 8:30am dental cleaning this week? Is that project meeting you scheduled with a peer really necessary to happen at 9:30am Wednesday?

And if you’ve been giving focus blocks jobs and your weekly block schedule is feeling like 😬 for the first block of the week, might it serve you better to make them flex or reclaim them as recovery blocks?

3. Upgrade or lean into “distractions” and “time wasters”

People generally misdiagnose distractions and time wasters, but they especially do so during under-acknowledged stressful transitions. Those distractions and time wasters are often decompression and coping behaviors.

It’s a sad reality that we make what accumulates to hours of doomscrolling and internet grazing but won’t allow ourselves a fraction of the time in more nourishing activities. When we’re emotionally wiped by 9:30am, it gets even harder to make better choices when the easy dopamine hits are a click away.

You have a better sense of what you’re up for this week than I do. Maybe the choice is to not negotiate with yet another human (yourself) and allow yourself the break this week. Maybe you know that your “vice” is making things worse and you’re ready to upgrade to activities that nourish and refocus you better.

But adding extra suffering in the form of shame, frustration, and regret is only going to make things worse this week and in the following weeks.

Making the Most of the Change

The spring time change arrives every March, as predictable as the season itself. Yet somehow, it catches many of us off guard year after year.

By practicing the 5 keys of Intentions, Awareness, Boundaries, Courage, and Discipline, it can be a relative non-event and become a temporary situation that doesn't create long-term problems.

More than that, though, we can invert it and make it a positive liminal week that signals that spring is here, bringing more sunlight, warm weather, and flowers.

1. Woosah: a slang expression variously used to indicate or achieve a state of calm and relaxation. (originally from Bad Boys II)