How to Effectively Handle Daylight Saving Time

Daylight Saving Time started here in the United States yesterday. It also started today in a few other countries on our side of the Atlantic Ocean, like Canada, and starts in many of the European countries in a couple weeks.
Do you find the time change to be highly disruptive to your life? Changing all of the clocks is the easy part. Dealing with your lack of sleep, and that of everyone else around you is the biggest challenge. It takes at least a few days to adjust to the hour change.

Then you have to listen to all the people who tell you that it’s better this way because you have an extra hour of daylight now, as if the government telling you to get up an hour early is really going to affect how much daylight you get in a day. Really? I don’t know about you, but I have never heard any conspiracy theorists talk about the government’s top-secret machine that slows the rotation of our planet. That would be the only way to get extra daylight.

How Do You Effectively Handle Day Light Saving Time?

I read that every year there are petitions written to try to get the governments to repeal the whole practice of Daylight Saving Time. It’s gone on so long and so many countries now participate in it that I don’t think anyone is going to get them to repeal it. Actually, there is so much software written to handle Daylight Saving Time that it would probably be like Y2K all over again if it was repealed.
Since it isn’t going to go away, there is only one way that I know of to really deal with Daylight Saving Time so that you don’t have to throw your life, or at least your sleep schedule, into chaos twice every year. That is to make your life DST-immune.
What does it mean to make your life DST-immune? I mean that you need to create a life where you aren’t controlled by a clock. Most of the world is driven by a clock, which arbitrarily dictates what time it is for you. And I do mean arbitrarily. Take a look at a time zone map of the world, or even just the United States and Canada. You will see that whole time zones disappear or get pushed an hour or even two hours one way or another.
I talked to someone a couple weeks ago who lives in Arizona. They don’t change their clocks for Daylight Saving Time where she is. She still has to get up an hour earlier for work though because, while they don’t change their clocks, they do shift their work hours an hour earlier. So it works out the same.
The only way to really deal with the time change is to protect yourself from DST by creating a life that isn’t controlled by a clock.

How Do You Create a DST-Immune Life?

It’s simple. You create a home-based business that runs on your own schedule. When it comes time for Daylight Saving Time to kick in, or off in the Fall, don’t set any appointments early in the day for the first week so that you have time to adjust to the time change without causing your body any unnecessary stress. For that matter, you might not want to ever set any appointments in the morning and reserve that time for working. Mornings are usually the quietest hours at my house.

Coaching

There are so many options for creating a home-based business. I follow many people who write blogs and have created consulting packages around their blogs to teach others how to blog. You can usually spot them pretty easily. They are the ones who tell you that blogging is hard. I don’t think it is hard at all, but the good coaches will help you get the clarity you need and get you headed the right way a lot faster than if you do it on your own. Adrienne Smith and Donna Merrill are excellent examples of people who do this and are who I would probably turn to if I was looking for a blogging coach.
You aren’t going to become a blogging coach right away if you have never blogged before, so this is something that will take a lot of time to get going, unless you are already experienced. Coaching isn’t for me. Not because of the experience, but because of the time it takes. There is a limit to how many people you can work with at a time, so there is a limit to your potential income. If you really enjoy working with people though, it is definitely something to consider.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is another popular avenue for creating a home-based business that isn’t tied to a clock. You set up a website that attracts people looking for solutions to a particular problem and you recommend the product that you are an affiliate for. It sounds simple, right? The real work is in getting the traffic to your website and building up enough of a reputation that people will take your advice. John W. Newman is someone who does this, and I do a little bit.
The benefit to affiliate marketing over coaching is that there is no limit to the number of sales you can make, so your potential income is unlimited. Once you have your sales page set up, the actual product doesn’t require any of your time. This is also a way that an online coach can supplement their time-constrained income, and I’m sure many of them do.

Network Marketing

My preferred way is with network marketing. Actually, for me it is internet network marketing. It’s very similar to affiliate marketing with a few additional benefits. Just like with affiliate marketing, you choose a product, or a company with a catalog of products, that you like. Then you promote those products as solutions to particular problems. I run my network marketing business exactly as I would for any other affiliate product.
There are some additional benefits to network marketing over affiliate marketing:

• Usually more products from a single company (sign up once)
• Build a team (earn money from more people)
• Can work online or offline (flexibility)
• A built-in support team in your upline and from corporate

Like with affiliate marketing, you don’t have a time constraint on the income you can make from selling the products. In addition, as I listed above, you probably have more than one product that you can sell from the network marketing company that you chose to work with.
There is a time constraint at first when you bring a new person onto your team because you are going to have to do some coaching to get them started. Once they are on their way, they create an unlimited income potential for themselves, and add to yours as well.
As you gain experience you can also add the other methods I listed above to your online business. It is easy to add in affiliate products and services that you already use to support your business, web hosting for example. That is the affiliate marketing that I do. You can also add in some coaching that could work as a lead generation method for building your team. I’m consider that as a possibility right now.
I have been building my network marketing business online for several years, and to further insulate myself from the effects of Daylight Saving Time, I homeschool my kids. Kids in my area get on the bus at 6:30 AM, which is unreasonably early for kids to have to be up and ready. I won’t subject them to DST on top of that.
Ok, the disclaimer. These methods can all insulate you from the clock changes every year, but they aren’t going to replace your job income over night. There is no guarantee that you will make any money at all. You have to do the work and you have to stick with it until it works. I started my network marketing business while I still had a full-time job, and I kept that job for another four years while I built it up to the point I could quit. Now that I have quit, I can’t think of anything that would get me to go back to the clock-driven world.

Take the Next Step

If you would like to know more about network marketing, especially internet network marketing, leave me a comment below or contact me directly. My email address and phone number are at the top right corner of this page. You can read more about how I approach network marketing.
Regardless of whether you are interesting in coaching, affiliate marketing or network marketing or not, I would love to hear your thoughts. Does Daylight Saving Time mess you up every year? Leave a comment below and let’s start a conversation.