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My problem with time

Us humans sure like dividing time into regular periods. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and so on. Most of these are fine. Days and years are only natural. I've always felt that hours were just a little bit too long, but they're just for scheduling things anyway. I would like to see more adoption of .beat time, but the 24 hour system is... fine. Minutes and seconds feel just right. You might expect me to complain about months here. Lots of people do complain about months. But honestly I don't mind months! I kind of like how they're totally irregular, and aside from being a little confusing, there's not really that much wrong with months.

The one thing I don't like is weeks. Does anybody? Hating the work week seems embedded in culture. Everybody hates Monday for signaling the beginning of work. By Wednesday you can barely remember what your weekend was like, yet the end of the week seems so far away. People like Friday, but only because the work week is finally over. And then Saturday and Sunday go by all too fast and it's back to work again. And again...

The week is just too long. But is this a problem with seven day long weeks, or working for five out of those seven days? There's a solution to the problem of working too much that's been gaining popularity lately: the 4-day workweek. All the coverage of it I can find is positive, saying that it increases work/life balance, improves productivity, doesn't lead to less work getting done, so on. Sounds great to me! But not everybody is convinced. Working for just four days out of seven does seem like a drastic change. But when you're stuck with seven days in a week, you only have two options: Either you work five days on and two days off (which is generally horrible), or four days on and three days off (which might not work for everything).

The lack of options is exactly my problem with the seven day week. There's no reason to limit ourselves to exactly seven days. What if there were only six? We could have a four day work week without as much downtime. Or with eight days in a week, we could stay working for five days but get a long weekend every week[1]. Or we could combine the two to make a 14-day week with one short work week, one short weekend, one long work week, and one long weekend that remains in sync with the 7-day one. Or we use the 6-day week, but split the workforce into thirds with different days off so that two-thirds of the workforce works on any given day. And of course people are sorted into their weekend groups at the age of 14 in a ritualistic yearly ceremony, like an unoriginal Young Adult novel. Or even more interesting arrangements.

Would any of those systems really work better than the current system, or the proposed 4 day work week? Well, I don't know. There are problems with changing how long the week is. It'd probably break religious calendars, for one. But surely it's easier (and easier to implement on a smaller scale) than changing the entire calendar, and people keep suggesting that... so I think it's worth a go.

[1] Bonus, we get to decide what the eigth day is called. I propose "Sexaday" to keep the tradition of n-2 names ("September", "October", "November", "December") and because I am extremely immature.