Not a superstition, but a piece of mechanical folklore.

My grandfather (born in London in the 1880s, lived there all his life) was a multi-skilled tradesman who worked as a patternmaker in an electrical engineering works. He could fix just about anything. He said that when adjusting the time on a clock, you should never wind the hands backwards - if you wanted to take it back five minutes, take it forward 11 hours 55 minutes instead. He said the mechanism would last better if you did that.