Good Morning M,
How ya doing this morning? I hope you slept well last night. Yeah, I just got up and it’s really evening, but here it doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s always dark outside. So, no matter which shift you are on, when you wake up to start your day you can imagine it’s morning. We are all on the first shift (to us).
Back in the ’70s, there was a group at Stanford University that came up with a plan for building large space structures in orbit. One of the ideas called for putting three colonies in close proximity of a construction facility. Each colony would send a team of employees to the facility to work a shift as it had been shown, time and time again that people are more productive when they are rested and starting their work in the morning. So, just as there are three 8-hour shifts in a 24-hour period on Earth, each of the three colonies (or settlements in orbital habitats) could be on different time zones, eight hours apart. By aligning the orbital habitats to produce a local sunrise at a particular time, it would have been a simple matter to set up such different time zones.
The psychological impact of that idea was really quite profound. Each team would be at their very best and most productive, because they are all on first shift (to them). No one is arriving at work in the middle of his or her day, on the second shift, and no one is coming to work when they feel it is really time to go to bed. This would be a win-win for everyone. Plus, visiting a different habitat would have had the feel of visiting a foreign country on Earth. You would experience that same eight-hour jetlag, albeit without having to travel 12 to 15 hours to get there. Travel from colony to colony would have been ¾ to 1½ hours, max. It would be like living in Denver and flying to Madrid for lunch.