If you woke up feeling shortchanged and googled it: the answer depends entirely on today's date. Clocks take an hour exactly once a year — on the spring-forward night — and give it back in autumn. Here's the schedule, and then the more interesting question hiding under this one.
The hour disappears at 2am local time on the night daylight saving time begins — clocks jump straight from 2:00 to 3:00.
Worth knowing: most of the world doesn't do this at all. The clock-changing habit is concentrated in North America, Europe, and parts of Oceania; most of Asia, Africa, and South America keeps one time year-round.
So: if today is one of the March dates above, yes — last night was the short one, and the grogginess is not your imagination. If it's any other day of the year, the clock is innocent.
Here's the strange part. The spring-forward hour is the most mourned hour in the calendar. People genuinely feel robbed by it — there are studies on the days after the change showing worse sleep, more crashes, grumpier moods. One missing hour, once a year, and everyone notices.
Now run the comparison. Daylight saving takes one hour a year, with a receipt, and returns it in November. Meanwhile the average adult spends six to seven hours a day on screens, a meaningful slice of it time they couldn't account for afterward if asked. Against a waking year of about 5,840 hours, even one quietly drifted hour a day comes to 365 lost hours a year — three hundred and sixty-five spring-forwards, with no autumn refund.
We notice the hour the government takes because it's announced. The hours that drift away unannounced — the scroll that ate the evening, the afternoon that left no trace — outnumber it hundreds to one, and nobody googles those the next morning.
The DST hour has one great virtue: it's visible. It has a date, a name, and a number, which is why it's the only lost hour most people can point to. The fix for the other 365 is to give them the same visibility.
That's the entire idea of keeping an hour ledger. At the end of each hour, one honest sentence about what it was, and a color: green if the hour was lived — work, rest, people, play, chosen on purpose — amber if it was neutral, red if it drifted away unaccounted. The red ones are your personal spring-forwards, except they're refundable: seen clearly for a week, they tend to shrink, because most drift survives on not being noticed. (How to notice lost hours goes deeper on the practice.)
So — did we lose an hour today? Check the table. But the better question, tonight and every night, is the one only you can answer: which hours did you lose today, and would you have handed them over if someone had announced the taking in advance? Start keeping the receipt in the app.