With hospitals worldwide adjusting to the challenges of the post-COVID-19 era, including staffing shortages and prominent employee burnout, the need for accurate metrics to guide safe staffing is critical. Historically, hospitals have used the midnight average daily census (ADC) to guide staffing allocation. The choice of midnight census is thought to be an artifact of the historical availability of information in precomputer era data systems but was solidified with the advent of Medicare and its definition of an inpatient day: "a day begins at midnight and ends 24 h later." 1The flawed nature of midnight census to guide staffing has been subject to prior scrutiny in the nursing literature, 2 and now in this issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine, Pierce and colleagues 3 share data from their institution suggesting that utilizing the midnight ADC may also underestimate workload for hospital medicine providers.