Americans are waking up to one extra hour today, marking the end of Daylight Saving Time in the US this year. While many have argued that the semi-annual ritual is “wreaking havoc” with our systems, there’s no doubting the joy of an extra hour of sleep or silence on a Sunday morning—especially with a tense presidential election week ahead.
So what would you do with an extra hour? Laze around? Read a book? Daydream? Meditate?
A short film premiered at the TED women’s conference in San Francisco on Oct. 26 proposed a fascinating thought experiment about what would happen if every day were stretched longer. Director Grace Lee interviewed six working women—among the busiest group of multi-taskers in the world—about what productive, mind-centering things they would do if they could somehow add more hours to each day.
The consensus: Do more work. “I think the answer I’m supposed to say is that I would take time for myself and meditate, take a bath,” says Aminah Bakeer, a filmmaker, a professor at California State University, Los Angeles, and a mother of one. “That’s not what I’m going to do. I’m probably just going to pile more work in.”