What would you do with an extra hour every day?

Today, November 1, we turned the clocks back and gained an extra hour, although anyone with young children knows that an extra hour on the clock does not necessarily translate into an extra hour of sleep.

It did get me thinking about what an additional hour could mean for the people running our parks and attractions if we could find it every day. In this industry, there is always another report to prepare, schedule to adjust, or update to chase down. The administrative work fills the time available, while the conversations and projects we wanted to get to keep moving further down the list.

AI, automation, and better use of technology can help us recover some of that time by assembling information, handling routine follow-ups, and reducing the work of moving data between systems. So the question for today is, If those improvements gave you an hour back each day, where would you choose to spend it?

Having spent plenty of summers inside the demands of park operations, these are five places I would start:

1. Spend an hour on the floor having real conversations.

Most operators spend time out in the park, but walking through on your way to solve a problem is a different experience from being available for a conversation. An hour with enough room to stop, listen, and ask a second question could tell you a great deal about the people working for you and the people choosing to spend their day with you.

With staff, that might mean learning what a seasonal employee hopes to do after graduation or what a supervisor wants to learn before the summer ends. With guests, it could mean understanding how they found you, what convinced them to visit, and which parts of the experience have been worth their time and money. A returning family may give you a clearer picture of what brings people back than another meeting about repeat visitation.

The value grows when you follow through on what you hear. Connecting an employee with a development opportunity or getting a guest’s frustration to the person who can resolve it gives those conversations a purpose beyond being friendly. You also give people a reason to keep telling you things you need to know.

2. Work on the numbers you can still change.

Daily reporting deserves attention, but when preparing and reviewing the numbers consumes the time you have for analysis, it is easy to spend most of your day explaining what already happened. An additional hour would give you room to forecast what comes next and decide where you can influence the result.

If next Friday’s advance sales are behind plan, you could look at booking pace, the weather forecast, group business, and expected spending together. From there, you can evaluate whether a group offer, a passholder invitation, or an evening event could close part of the gap, including what each would cost to deliver. You have time to challenge the assumptions and give the team a plan they can act on.

That same hour could move a new event from a conversation into a workable proposal, with a defined audience, operating budget, and reason for guests to return. It could also be the hour when you finally schedule the technology demo you have postponed for three months, bringing the people who do the work and a clear understanding of the problem you need solved. Over time, protecting this space gives strategy a regular place in the week instead of leaving it for whenever things settle down.

3. Teach someone to handle the next decision.

When a supervisor comes to you with a question during a busy day, giving them the answer is usually the fastest way to keep things moving. The difficulty is that answering the same kinds of questions all summer can leave you with a team that still needs you to make decisions they could learn to handle themselves.

An hour of practical coaching could start with walking an area together and asking that supervisor to explain what they see, what concerns them, and what they would do next. You might work through a service recovery, prepare for a difficult employee conversation, or discuss how they would adjust their team’s deployment as demand changes. The conversation gives you a chance to explain your judgment and understand theirs.

For that coaching to carry into the next shift, they also need to understand what they can decide, which resources they can use, and when to bring you in. Technology can help organize the training materials and record progress, while your time goes toward helping someone apply what they have learned. By the end of the season, that investment could mean a more capable supervisor and fewer decisions waiting on your availability.

4. Fix the problem everyone has learned to work around.

Every park has a recurring frustration that the team has become very good at managing. Guests arrive at the wrong entrance, a menu requires the same explanation with every order, or two departments keep passing the same issue back and forth. Because employees find ways to keep the day moving, the underlying problem can remain in place for an entire season.

Use the hour to experience one of those processes yourself, beginning where the guest begins. Read the confirmation email on your phone, follow the directions, join the queue, and pay attention to where you become uncertain or need help. Then spend time with the employees handling that uncertainty every day and ask what they keep having to explain, correct, or do twice.

Some improvements may be as straightforward as correcting an email or making a sign easier to understand; others will need a clearer handoff or a change to the process. Giving the problem an hour of focused attention lets you start making those improvements and return to see whether they helped. It also shows employees that when they raise a recurring issue, there is a chance someone will make their work easier.

5. Protect an hour for your people outside the park.

Some days, I would use that hour to get home for lunch or sit down for dinner with my family. During the summers I was at the park, a meal at home could feel impossible, especially on a Friday or Saturday when there was always another reason to stay. Having some administrative work handled before it reached my desk might have made it possible to say yes to those plans and mean it.

Work feels like family in this industry, and for some of you, it truly is. You are part of businesses where three, four, six, or more generations have worked together, often alongside people who have known your family for decades. That connection is meaningful, but being surrounded by your park family can make it easy to overlook how little time you have spent with your spouse, your kids, your friends, or the interests you have outside work.

Recovering the hour is only part of making that time available. You still have to arrange the coverage, make a clear handoff, and protect the plan when another routine task gives you a reason to cancel it. There will always be something pulling you back to your desk, which is why this hour deserves a place on the calendar and the same commitment you would give something important at the park. The people waiting for you at home deserve to know that when you say you will be there, they can count on it.

The clocks give us an extra hour once a year, but there are opportunities in our everyday work to recover time we have accepted as spoken for. Finding them starts with looking closely at the administrative tasks that fill our days and deciding which could be handled more effectively with AI, automation, or technology we may already own. It also means deciding where that time belongs before the next demand absorbs it. If this sounds like something you want to use this extra hour today to learn how to get started with AI, just reach out, turns out I have a spare hour this week too, and my young kids are still sleeping.